Ponitka's Pierogi by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview
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5 – Fresh Pierogi for Albion
The First Ponitka's Pierogi Restaurant
By the time the sign went up - PONITKA'S PIEROGI - EST. 2026 - most people in Albion assumed it was a joke. A prank, maybe, or one of those doomed "revitalization" projects the city flirted with every few years. The storefront sat on Eaton Street, in a brick building that had once held a barber, then a shoe repair shop, then nothing at all for twenty years except dust and the memory of better decades.
Albion had been shrinking since 1970. Everyone knew the numbers; 7,700 people left, a third of them now black, most of them tied in one way or another to the Malleable; now Hayes-Albion, now Harvard Industries, now just "the plant." The ironworks had once pulled in Poles, Slovaks, Ukrainians, and anyone else willing to stand near molten metal for a steady wage. Their houses still lined the streets north of town, sagging but stubborn, like old men who refused to sit down.
The Ponitka family had been part of that wave. Wladyslaw’s maternal grandfather, Stanislaw Wisniewski, arrived in 1946 with a trunk, a prayer card, and a willingness to shovel anything that needed shoveling. He worked the furnaces until his lungs gave out, then the coal mine until his back did. His son, Walt Wisniewski, worked at the Malleable too, but by the time he retired the company had merged, rebranded, and reorganized so many times that no one could remember what the original logo looked like.
Walt's daughter and Wladyslaw’s mother, Irene Ponitka (nee Wisniewski) was fifty-five in 2026, recently widowed, and tired of driving to Jackson every time she wanted pierogi that tasted like her grandmother's. She had no business plan, no investors, and no illusions. She just had the recipes; written in a mix of Polish, English, and her grandmother's private shorthand, and a sense that if she didn't do it now, she never would. Her wildest prayers were answered when Wladyslaw contacted her telling her of his plans to open a pierogi place in Albion.