A local’s guide to the 24-hour, Eastern European cuisine of Brighton Beach

Farideh Sadeghin is a chef and video host based in Brooklyn. As part of a new series, she is exploring New York City neighborhoods through their food and histories.

Stepping off the Brighton Beach Avenue subway platform can feel like arriving in another country. The Brooklyn neighborhood, which is between Coney Island and Manhattan Beach, is dense and buzzing with enough Eastern European markets, shops, and restaurants to distract you from catching some rays on the sand – or at least make a beach day that much better.

Brighton Beach is also referred to as Little Odessa – after the port city of the same name in Ukraine – due to it being home to thousands of Russian-speaking Soviet Jews who immigrated to the neighborhood, according to the Guardian. While some Eastern European immigrants began arriving in the area as early as the 1920s and again after World War II, one of the biggest waves was in the 1970s. It was then that the Russian government relaxed emigration policies for Jews and thus they arrived in Brighton, fleeing discrimination. The breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought another wave of immigrants, according to the nonprofit New Women New Yorkers.

Jessica Quinn, the Jewish daughter of a Latvian mother and a Ukrainian father, grew up on Long Island but spent most weekends in Brighton Beach, visiting family and shopping at M&I International (now closed, but previously the premiere grocery store at the time) and dining at Tatiana’s. While her parents – who met on a blind date after immigrating here in the late 70s and early 1980s – settled on Long Island, most of their extended family was in Brighton Beach.

Jessica Quinn met her now-wife Trina Quinn in 2011 and by 2015, the couple began exploring Brighton Beach together, allowing Jessica Quinn to show off the world that she grew up loving. Trina fell in love with the area as well,…