Little Walter’s: Old World Charm, New World Flavor

Little Walter’s bustling dining room / Photography by Ed Newton

The server at Little Walter’s looks around the dining room. It’s early yet. Quiet. In the kitchen, the crew are still setting their mise, hauling in tubs of onions, and messing with the massive, wood-fired, black iron rotisserie oven that dominates the space. Behind the bar, they’re checking stock.

She leans close over the table.

“Look,” she says. “Can I tell you this? The pierogi, I like to tell people, is a big, meaty boy. But everyone who comes in here, they go hard on the pierogi. It’s all they eat. But you want to know how to do it right?”

“Absolutely,” I say.

She asks if I’ve ever been to Zahav. I have, and say so. She asks if I know how they do the salatim there — the little plates of hummus and pickles and beets with tehina. I do, and say so.

Spread at Little Walter’s

“So that’s what you need to do here,” she says. Salads, pickles — bites of small, sharp, bittersweet things. “Like our version of Zahav’s salatim.” You order that, then the pierogi, then the kielbasa for sure, maybe some of the house sourdough rye with dill butter and smalec, which is lard. “That way, you can put together the perfect bite. A little bit of everything, all balanced. Trust me.”

It’s a bold move, comparing this more or less brand-new upscale Polish restaurant to Zahav — one of the most famous restaurants in the city for more than a decade. But she’s right: Polish salatim-style is the best way to experience chef Michael Brenfleck’s love letter to his mom’s cooking, his grandfather Walter’s kielbasa, and holiday meals at home where the tables groaned under the weight of homey Eastern European comfort food. He might be known as the guy who spent the past few years running the kitchen at Spice Finch, but this is where he belongs.

So I order just like our server suggested:­ pierogi, pickles, bread, lard, and kielbasa, bias-cut and smoky and served with a beautifully harsh coarse-grain mustard, and then some chicken cutlets too, pink slices of pickled cauliflower on top like deconstructed rosebuds.

At the table, we eat pickled cubes of red beet dragged through dill pesto, insanely good spiral-cut pickled cucumbers, and marinated heirloom tomatoes tiger-striped in red and orange. In between, there are lard-smeared knobs of rye bread and thick slices of pork shoulder kielbasa, smoky and spiced with marjoram and coriander, sharp with the sting of mustard.

Little Walter’s kielbasa

The pierogi ruskie are the best I’ve had. No contest. The skins are thick and chewy, blistered in the heat of that enormous oven, smoky, a little greasy, and they’re stuffed with potato and farmer cheese, veiled in sautéed onion, and blobbed with sour cream. Under normal circumstances, pierogi often exist solely as a vehicle for the consumption of sour cream because (I’ve been told) it’s rude just to eat it with a spoon. Here, the sour cream is almost unnecessary.

Pierogi ruskie at Little Walter’s

In the dining room, the waitress comes around again. She asks if everything is good, and I just nod because my mouth is full of pierogi. She sees her opportunity and tells me a story. She’s Ukrainian, she says. Her mother is very Ukrainian. And one night, she brings the pierogi ruskie home to her and tells her that she has to try them. That they’re the best. But no, her mother won’t.

“She says, No,” the waitress tells me. Makes a face like her mother’s face — pursed lips, suspicious eyes. She raises a finger and wags it, doing an impression of her mother’s voice. “No, we don’t eat the Russian pierogi. Russian pierogi will never be the best.”

Her laughter fills the room, making the guys in the kitchen look over to see what’s so funny.

And in that moment, I love the place completely. I love it like I love sour cream. I love it like a hundred pierogi.

Little Walter’s chef Michael Brenfleck

There’s more to love here too. Pier­ogi­­ stuffed with squash blossom and dipped in horseradish cream. Rotisserie pork with potatoes as believably rustic­ as so many other places pretend to be — smoky and fatty and basted with vinegar for that ideal razor of sweet-sour flavor to cut the heaviness. The room itself is cozy, simple, and dark, with decorative china like Grandma’s special-occasion dishes. The cocktails are powerful, Eastern European-inspired, and heavy on the vodka, pickle juice, and house cherry nalewka — which, if you’re lucky (and you laugh at your server’s stories), might arrive like magic, as a shot in a schnapps glass, as the plates are being cleared.

It’s strange, sometimes, the things that make a place endearing. That make it feel like home. Nothing moves me so much as those pierogi ruskie and the sound of a server’s laugh echoing­ off the walls. And while the same things may not have the same effect on everyone, joy, pierogi, and sour cream certainly work for me.
3 Stars — Come from anywhere in Philly

Rating Key
0 stars: stay away
★: come if you have no other options
★★: come if you’re in the neighborhood
★★★: come from anywhere in Philly
★★★★: come from anywhere in America

Published as “Pierogi Perfection” in the October 2024 issue of Philadelphia magazine.