American Dream May Be Tucked Inside A Piroshky

It isn't the name that gets you, lushly though it wraps around the tongue.

After all how many people know what a piroshky - of "My Favorite Piroshky" shops - is, let alone have a favorite one?

No, it's the symphony of smells that grabs you. Delicate tendrils of roasted garlic mixing with the contralto of baking yeast dough and the basso profundo of stewing meat.

You stop and look in the shop window.

Large puffs of golden pastry line the shelves, bursting with apple slices and swirls of cinnamon, or pregnant with mushrooms, cheeses and meats.

A sweetly smiling employee offers the final seduction: "Would you like to try a sample?" she asks the passing Bellevue Square shoppers.

Behind the counter of the small store, a stocky man with blond crew-cut hair, wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt, strides back and forth, back and forth between the cash register, the soda machine, the customer line, the cooks at the window, the kitchen in the back.

This is his domain, his dream.

Alex Sandler, 33, a Jewish refugee from Kiev, Ukraine, left his job at a shoe factory, crossed an ocean, survived New York City, traversed a continent, and worked as a stock boy in a Seattle store before he emerged as an entrepreneur.

"I've always wanted to have my own business," Sandler said in an English so rapid and robust it's difficult to believe he only learned the language six years ago. "I saw some supermarkets selling piroshkies and knew I could make better ones."

The piroshky shops are a reflection of the surge in refugees from the former Soviet republics to the Seattle area. In 1987 King County received less than five such refugees; in 1993 the county welcomed more than 1,000. There are now about 9,500 refugees from the former Soviet republics living in King County, estimated Natalia Bologova, refugee program coordinator for the nonprofit Employment Opportunities Center in Bellevue. About 4,000 of them settled on the Eastside, she said.

Sandler has capitalized on this influx, opening his first store on Capitol Hill a year and a half ago, and his second in Bellevue Square last year. (Piroshky Piroshky, a different business, has been enticing Pike Place Market shoppers for three years and last month opened its second store in Crossroads Mall in Bellevue.)

With the help of his sister, a professional cook who emigrated from Ukraine in 1993, Sandler reinvented his mother's piroshky recipes to accommodate American tastes. Pizza, ham-and-cheese and smoked salmon-and-cream cheese piroshkies occupy the same menu as the more traditional potato, cabbage and mushroom-filled ones. The Bellevue store also offers hot meals (such as lamb stroganoff and pirogies - filled dumplings), salads, sandwiches, sweet pastries and crepes.

"We're both adventurous and we wanted to try something new," said customers Margo Peacock and Cece Reitz, taking a break from shopping to try a piroshky pizza. "We like it - it's different."

"At first people would ask what a piroshky is," Sandler said. "But now we sell hundreds a day."

His potato-and-cheese and fish-shaped smoked salmon-cream cheese piroshkies are the most popular, he said.

About 10 people, including his wife and fellow emigres from the former Soviet Union, work in his Bellevue store. Sandler himself works about 12 hours day, seven days a week.

He's working hard for an all-American dream: "Someday I'd like to turn this into a chain," he said.

And someday, perhaps "piroshky" will be as common an Americanism as "Big Mac."

"Food Folks" is an ongoing series about special people doing special things in the world of food - people who rarely make headlines, but every day add flavor to the lives they touch.

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