One of the hot new restaurant openings for 2017 was Café Baba Yaga, a new Polish café open on St-Jacques Street in St-Henri, as of September.
It’s run by a team with roots at Old Montreal restaurant L’Orignal, and is a rare case of a new restaurant focusing on Eastern European cuisine in the city — while Montreal has a number of fantastic and reputable places for pierogies, cabbage rolls, borscht, and more, most of the top players have been around for years.
Baba Yaga gets into the classics, too (many of the kitchen’s recipes and tricks come from the recipes of co-owner Monika Terlecki’s Polish mom) — but particularly on the pierogi side, is willing to shake up tradition.
Pierogies filled with lamb Rogan Josh curry, and pierogies filled with an apple pie filling are just two iterations of the classic Polish dumpling that have appeared. Eater paid the café a visit to see how they get made: check out the resulting video, above.