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[title]In 1992, “Achy Breaky Heart” rattled across radios, Russia and the United States reached a joint understanding agreement on arms reduction, and New York City Restaurant Week was created as ”a one-time culinary event to welcome the Democratic National Convention,” according to New York City Tourism + Conventions.
The inaugural gastronomic fête ran for four days that summer, when spots like Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Grill served specials for $19.92.
The following year, Pavlo “Pasha” Servetnyk was born in Kherson, Ukraine, 664 miles from Moscow. Today, he is the executive chef at Slava, a Ukrainian restaurant new to the Soho space previously occupied by famed cocktail bar Pegu Club, presently poised for its first Restaurant Week. Servetnyk describes his professional path here as a very long story.
After attending college for computer programming, Servetnyk worked as a line cook, then sous chef before appearing on Ukraine’s MasterChef: Professionals. He won the reality television competition show’s top spot, and used his winnings to travel for an internship at Michelin-starred restaurant El Celler de Can Roca in Spain, which led to another at Gaggan Anand in Thailand. He returned to Ukraine, then Covid came.
“I think, ‘what I can do?’” he says of that moment, landing on something that might sound familiar: sourdough.
Servetnyk started pitching his product to area shops, eventually racking up orders, growing his business with larger baking facilities, and adding croissants, eclairs, danish and pizza-making operations to his portfolio. Then Russia’s war in Ukraine came.
“My parents tell me, ‘keep busy,’” as the conflict advanced on February 24, 2022, he says. “On the first day: work,” he says. “We made bread all night. Two thousand loaves of bread.”
Determined to donate as many baked goods as possible, Servetnyk and a driver packed a vehicle and began circling the city. “Everywhere where I see people, I stop,” he says. An employee did the same, heading in another direction to cover more ground.
Explosions increased and Servetnyk and his wife moved into his factory, which seemed safer; sturdier than home. And more efficient for his new purposes.
“We can make bread for tomorrow,” he says. “It’s like, my idea: we keep my wife, and my life, in this factory. And we can help people. We make bread, sleep, and, the next day, go in the city and share for everyone.”
They did this for 12 days before a brief return home to clean up, quickly coming back to start up once more, Servetnyk says, aiming to fill a gap where “everything closed” and “people can’t buy food and bread and everything like that.”
Servetnyk’s solid social media following, built, in part, from his MasterChef season, helped him both communicate with people he could add to his delivery route, and begin calling for donations to continue his mission. That presence might have also made him more visible to the Russian military.
In a few months, Servetnyk and some of his staff had distributed half-a-million items, he says.
“After that, Russian military start hunting me,” he says. “I made something good for people. For city. And Russian military don’t like it.”
Servetnyk stopped shaving and grew his hair long in an effort to change his appearance. He and his wife decided to leave; moving around Ukraine and eventually into Russia as they attempted to exit the region.
He says that stops at military zone checkpoints were frequent, each one made heavier with the belief that they had his name and photo on file.
The couple made it through to Georgia and on to Spain, where they rented an apartment and friends connected Servetnyk with a bakery job. Several months later, another friend, also from his first stint in Spain, offered a place to stay in NYC for a few weeks, which the pair accepted, arriving in December.
Servetnyk opened the Michelin Guide and began his job search, landing a role at La Mercerie. His employment was brief before an introduction to Slava partner Nazar Hrab, also from Ukraine, changed the trajectory once more, for all parties involved.
Nazar Hrab opened Slava with partners Josh Spiezle, Travis Odegard and Matt Sylvester in November of last year. They’d previously opened East Village restaurant and bar Pineapple Club in 2020. They followed both with Bee’s Knees in Williamsburg this past January. The middle child, Slava, did not emerge to their expectations.
Lush and lovely as it is, with velvety, crimson banquettes, huge, huggy booths and Hrab’s fantastic beverage program, including a clarified borscht cocktail and beautiful vodka infusions, was only fully realized once Servetnyk joined and rewrote the menu two months after they first opened, Hrab and Spiezle say.
They’re both quick to speak passionately about Servetnyk’s skill. Hrab, who relocated to the U.S. in 2013, calls the chef a bread “magician,” and underscores his commitment to ingredient sourcing and recipe creation.
“Pasha is super talented,” Hrab says. “Personally, I never tried that interpretation of Ukrainian cuisine,” which includes a caprese salad that swaps mozzarella with bryndza cheese (“Everyone knows it, everyone eats it at home,” Servetnyk says) and rearranges a classic chicken Kyiv as a sandwich alongside four varenyky varieties.
“We’ve gone through several iterations of the menu,” Spiezle says, “and really settled on what we now call modern Ukrainian food.”
“I’m super happy with what it is right now,” Hrab says.
The team imagines this summer—a season they acknowledge is typically slow for restaurants—as a sort-of grand reopening.
“That’s really the goal; a kind of relaunch of us,” Spiezle says. “Any initial press that we had, that is all very irrelevant to what Slava is now, as we’ve found our footing and what we want our identity to be.” Participation in New York City Restaurant Week is part of that push to reignite the spotlight.
Joining was an easy decision, Spiezle says, with little side work. He had to fill out some forms, file photos and send the planned special menu to be listed among the bountiful few.
The 31-year-old institution is a virtual eating holiday for a certain set of hospitality-obsessed locals, a fun lark for more casual eaters and a boon for tourists with good timing. It also has powerful distillation possibilities.
Although it seems to grow with each edition, some lineups surpassing 500 locales, the promotion’s abundant partnerships, a volume impossible to squeeze even into what’s expanded to four weeks, are a fraction of the five boroughs’ tens of thousands of eateries; narrowing the field, at least for certain searchers’ searches, for newcomers like Slava.
Slava’s youth is also a Restaurant Week novelty. Listees usually skew older, and additions in their infancy are infrequent. Likewise Slava’s cuisine category. Ukrainian restaurants, notables like Veselka and now-closed Odessa aside, are also relatively few-and-far-between in NYC, and thus rare among the biannual Restaurant Week bunch. Involvement, even with about $1,600 in fees in Slava’s case, they say, and even as its partners do not expect to make money on its discounted prix fixe picks, could prove a clever move in the long run. They’re banking on exposure, confident that awareness will bring people, crucially, back.
“The goal of Restaurant Week seems to match up exactly with what we're trying to do right now,” Spiezle says. “That's getting more people in here and showing them something that maybe they might not normally try, at a more reasonable price.”
The 1992, $19.92 deals would be $43.87 in today's dollars. Summer Restaurant Week, 2023’s price tiers are $30, $45 and $60 for two- to three-course lunch and dinner specials from July 24 through August 20.
Restaurants can tailor their options, to a degree, and Slava will serve three courses for $45 at dinner from Sunday-Friday for the first three weeks, until August 14. In addition to the caprese take (usually $18) and selections from the varenyky quartet ($18-20), guests can choose from a Ukrainian ceviche ($28) to start, followed by that knockout chicken Kyiv sandwich ($24), a duck leg with potato gratin ($32) or grilled broccolini ($21). Cherry varenyky ($20) or a lovely raspberry and sour cherry meringue tart are available for dessert ($16). So, choose the ceviche, chicken varenyky, duck and dessert dumplings, and those assembled tastes amount to $45 rather than an everyday $106, before tax and tip in either case. Those infusions and borscht tipples will also be discounted for Restaurant Week patrons.
Taking care to fully represent the menu they feel they’ve finally nailed is of paramount importance in Slava’s bid to win repeat business, especially as they’re braced only to, maybe, break even on these specific bookings. While more established spots can skate by on, say, paillard on frisée, or lower-cost items, only a highly polished first impression will reflect future success for lesser-knowns like Slava.
Beyond that original DNC inspiration, Restaurant Week also exists to, hopefully, drive visitors to venues during historically slower periods, helpfully introduce diners to new or new-to-them destinations, and, ideally mint repeat guests, if not regulars. All three are key, but that last one, in particular, will be the greatest measure of success for Slava’s first foray into the program, to whatever anecdotal extent it can be tracked.
“The goal here is to just bring people in, so they try,” Hrab says. “Maybe they're going to come again, maybe they're going to tell some friends. And if we're lucky, they're going to order a bottle of wine or a cocktail. And that's where we're going to make some profits,” he says.
“But other than that, it's just gonna be fun to have people trying something new that they never would try otherwise.”