It looks like a grimy old drinking hole from the outside. But inside, the Polish resto Zagloba is a gypsy cavern right out of my earliest armchair adventures with Nancy Drew. I’m surrounded by forest green and ruby red. Colourful bursts of plastic flowers adorn tables already ostentatious with emerald and gold scalloped and fringed and tasselled tablecloths.

Massive heaps of purple and yellow irises are positively funerary; these centrepieces reflect double in the corner of a tiny mirrored dance floor. Colourful string lights line the walls. There’s a light-up Marilyn Monroe Chanel no 5 poster, a poster of sexy legs, some old car paintings, and a mammoth mural of lecherous old drunks clinking their beer mugs into the air. It’s festive, fabulous, kitschy, and absolutely gaudy. I’m instantaneously at home.

If anything ever embodied the phrase “Christmas in July,” this is it. It’s only marginally less sweltering inside than out, so I consider absconding, and then I consider an ice cold Zywiec. Just at that moment, a stunning, statuesque woman approaches the table, bearing ice waters. I can’t take my eyes off of her. Amazing and Amazonian, this black haired beauty heralds another era altogether, a parallel world. She is resplendent in form-fitting greenery, with a massive jade-coloured medallion around her neck. There is a bead of sweat on her upper lip. I wonder if she is going to read my fortune.

“Hello,” she says, and the spell is broken by the here and now. “Welcome.” And so we meet Margaret, who has been the face of Zagloba for three years. When I ask her what’s good from the menu, she replies that everything is, and I can see that she still means it after some 900 plus days of dishing it out.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with European soul food. But come on, how good can cabbage really be? As a nearly full-blooded German, I love kraut as much as the next person. But there are only so many ways you can skin a cabbage.

I open the menu, which is short and sweet. There are a few food selections, and “alkohole.” I ponder the pork hocks, but not for long- I always hated them as a kid, and if my Oma couldn’t make them palatable, I doubt anyone can. But if you love pig’s feet, and many do, there aren’t too many places to find them in Toronto. I also bypass the rainbow trout, the herring, the schnitzel, the sirloin steak, and the golabki- cabbage rolls. I’m sure they are all outstanding treasures of Eastern Europe, but the pierogies are flashing at me, hypnotically luring me to cheat on my health regime and consume the forbidden gluten.

Other celiacs shouldn’t try this at home, or abroad for that matter, but I figure if I’ve made the decision to ixnay the wheat from my life, it can be my decision to have a one night love affair. I feel dangerous and wild when I announce to my date, “I’m going to have the pork-stuffed pierogies.”

But she shows no alarm at all. “Me, too,” she says. “The cheddar potato.” There is also sauerkraut stuffing, but we settle on these classics. I tell Margaret I’d like those with the “Hunter’s Stew” and she just shakes her head and chuckles a throaty little melody. “It’s too big,” she says.

“Oh, I can eat a lot,” I assure her. But she shakes her head again and points at the soup menu. I definitely can’t do the beef tripe, so I order the borscht. Borscht, which is common to countries across Eastern Europe, has endless variants, but all are based on the beet.

To my surprise, the borscht is a steaming clear ruby broth, not the chunky cold medley of veggies I’m used to from home. I gingerly bring the soup to my lips. One gets used to their grandmother’s secrets and wary of another’s. But one lovin’ spoonful leads to another- this stuff is an elixir, it’s divine, it’s the blood of the gods.

The pierogies arrive. Cursed to all who thaw no-name $1.69 pierogies from No Frills and throw a few onions with them into a frying pan. You cheapen the manna of the gypsies. Here, we are served heaping platters of steaming, perfectly fried pierogies, with onion bits and sour cream, along with both red and green cole slaws. It’s been so long since I ingested gluten that I’m getting an opium rush. I know later I’ll crash and want to sleep for four days, but they’re so damn good it’s worth it.

For the uninitiated, the pierog is kind of like a chubby Slavic tortellini. It’s a penny stretching principle used the world over, in ravioli, wantons, dumplings, mantu. Just boil unleavened dough and stuff with whatever’s on hand. In Russia, the Ukraine, Lithuania, Hungary and Poland, this tends to be cabbage, potato, cheese, bits of pork or other meats, and so on. The pieorogies must be served with sour cream, fried onions, and often, bits of bacon.

The whole kit and caboodle comes to $25 for both of us to gorge ourselves silly. We are invited back, as Saturday and Sunday evenings feature live music and polka dancing. I hope Margaret saves me a spot on her dance card.

Zagloba Restaurant
416 530 0303
317 Roncesvalles
Toronto

Author, Artist, Poet Lorette C. Luzajic's website is www.thegirlcanwrite.net. Browse her books at Amazon.ca

The Real Dish...

You may have seen her at the last wine tasting- it was hard to miss her. She was the only one in sneakers and jeans, jeans she was busting out of, bangles jangling as she scarfed back corned beef and pickles, toasting everyone who walked by: “Praise the Lord and pass the Chardonnay!”

Yeah, that was me. I confess I’m a little unrefined. I hardly know my pate or canapés from canopies (but I can spell hors d’oeuvres without looking it up.) I speak locavore, but that’s only because I was born and bred in Niagara, and the celebrated vino runs through my veins. I’m not remotely comfortable in restaurants with truffle glace and white linen napkins and and white jazz. Oh, I don’t mind the odd balsamic reduction, don’t get me wrong- but I’m more likely to order jalapeño mayo and eat the yam frites with my fingers. I can’t dine without spilling Dijon on my knock-off Pucci scarf and knocking over the Perrier. And my editor would be shocked to see that most of the essential utensils are missing from my pauper’s kitchen, where I can barely fit the dish rack.

But I’m passionate about food. Like most of my habits, good and bad, I do it to excess. That’s just the kind of girl I am. Over the top, with zany, unapologetic appetites. I’m voracious to learn about food. I write regularly about eating, and I resurrected my body from lifelong illness by learning all I could about nutrition. I’m an enthusiastic advocate of eat to live, live to eat. And I’m fun!

I’ve got seventy spices in my crammed cupboard and create soul food from all over the world. I make food that nourishes the body and proclaims my love for life. And I’ll bet my sole ladle that I’m not the only foodie or reader who feels most at home in dingy hole in the wall diners. And I’ll bet my prize wooden salad bowl that the rest of you would love to try some of Toronto’s ethnic adventures, but just aren’t sure how to get past the unfamiliar menu or customs, or your fear of grime. So, I’ll take you there.

Once in a while I pull out my French cooking school manual, to pay homage to the gourmet universe. But then I thaw out a rack of chicken thighs- forget the boneless, skinless crock we’ve been force-fed- I cook with skin! And I pour on sweet paprika from Croatia, bought at the Eastern European deli on Pape, with salt and yogurt. And I chop up a few red onions and toss them in red wine and the dried up piece of Genoa salami in the far corner of the fridge.

Oh, yes, I can drop six dollars on one bite of truffle hazelnut crème chocolat - generally, I have to, because I’m celiac and avoid soy like the plague, so most cheap chocolate bars are off limits. But I can stretch that six bucks into a spectacular symphony of flavour for two, or spend ten discovering the joys of Kenyan corn bread or raw meat from Ethiopia. In Toronto, there’s a whole underworld of unsung gourmet, diners with menus in Swahili and faded Formica tableaus that translate into mind-bending flavour. Let me show you the real dish.