On our last day in Seattle before heading out to visit friends in Redmond, we hung out with our friends Julie and Howard, checking out a few of the tourist sites around downtown Seattle. One of our first destinations was, admittedly, one of the more touristy spots, adjacent to Pike Place market: Piroshky Piroshky.
Being of Eastern European heritage myself, I love some good Piroshky: that Russian-heritage leavened bread stuffed with either sweet or savory fillings, as a classic Eastern European street food, along with its culinary cousins like the knish. And, while they have a few other baked items in their various cases, there’s really one reason you’re coming to Piroshky Piroshky: to get some of their sweet or savory stuffed break piroshky. (A linguistic moment here: the Russian singular form of piroshky is pirozhok, but since it’s a loan word you’ll see the work “piroshky” used in both singular and plural forms… including on the signage at Piroshky Piroshky. Such is the way of international language.).
While Piroshky Piroshky is located pretty much directly across from ground zero at Pike Place, Compared to our visit a week before on Friday afternoon, early Saturday morning was a decent time to visit the Pike Place area: it was definitely starting to become busy, but not yet overrun. You could definitely tell it gets crazy at times, since Piroshky Piroshky has Disneyland-style queuing ropes up, with the ability to handle almost 100 people in line, but at 9am on a Saturday, there were only a dozen people ahead of us in line.
Many of the piroskhy are made on site, and you can gaze in at the bakery counter making them as you wait in line. For our visit, they were making their salmon pâté piroskhy: rolling out the dough, putting the fillings in, and crimping them for baking.
Getting to the front of the line, you can tell that Piroshky Piroshky has been doing this for a while: they run an extremely efficient operation: you order your Piroshky, and one person rings you up while another goes around gathering up the freshly-baked piroshky to fulfill the order. It’s a system that worked well, and we managed to grab a good selection of both sweet and savory piroshky to take to an outdoor table near the water to eat.
First up was a Bacon, Hashbrown, Egg, and Cheese pirozhok. This was a nicely yeasted bread base, with a medium chew, filled with a mix of egg, chopped bacon, hashbrown, and the final pastry egg-washed and sprinkled with Tillamook cheddar. This was a fine breakfast choice, with the yeasty notes of the bread combining nice with the egg and hashbrown. I’d certainly get these regularly for breakfast as an option.
Next up were some salmon pâté piroskhy, of the same design we saw being made in the window. While I didn’t try these myself (salmon pâté is the express route to triggering my fish allergy), everyone else at the table enjoyed this, reporting they had good salmon and dill notes.
Next, we moved into the sweeter part of the menu, with several of us purchasing cinnamon and cardamom braid piroshky. Using essentially a slightly sweetened version of the same dough as the savory items, here the dough has been stretched, hand-braided, and flavored with cinnamon and cardamom, with a hit of orange peel as well. This was a pleasant, sweet-but-not-cloying pastry that would be good either for breakfast or a snack, and a favorite of the table.
Finally, we had two rhubarb piroskhy as well, with the rhubard giving a nice tangy note that combined well with a sugar dusting.
In general, I liked all the piroskhy we tried, perhaps enjoying the savory better than sweet, but both were quite pleasing, and, while a bit on the pricey side, still reasonable for this part of town. I rather liked the place, but if going back I’d make sure to do what we did, and that’s get there early. We enjoyed our piroskhy quite a bit, but I’m not sure I would have been as enthusiastic if I had to wait an hour in line (like some people just a bit later in the morning).
