Svietlana Zabetchuk has been stuffing, folding and pinching pierogi in Pierogies Plus’s production kitchen for more than 20 years.
So, of course, you expect her to be good at it.
What surprises is how fast she can turn a 3-inch circle of dough and ice cream scoop of creamy mashed potato into the perfect half-moon dumpling.
It takes the Ambridge resident a mere six seconds, start to finish. All told, she and her equally-dexterous co-workers need only about 20 minutes to pump out some 25 dozen pierogi after chunks of a 30-pound batch of dough — made fresh daily — is fed several times through a sheeter, smoothed and stretched like a blanket across a 14½-foot-long work table and then rolled out with a biscuit cutter into perfectly shaped circles.
Then again, the women have to be fast to keep up with Pittsburgh’s insatiable demand for the traditional Polish food, which Pierogies Plus owner Helen Pelc Mannarino started selling out of a renovated gas station on Island Avenue in McKees Rocks in 1991 and today is considered one of the area’s quintessential eats.
Ms. Mannarino was 27 when she made her 1974 voyage from communist Poland to visit her aunt in the Presston neighborhood of the Rocks. Even though her maternal grandparents had lived here for about a decade in the early 1900s and her mother, Julia, had also visited, it was a scary trip for the Warsaw native; propaganda demonizing the U.S. ensured that Poles viewed the West as a dangerous place, she said.
She not only ended up falling in love with Pittsburgh, but also fell head over heels for the Italian friend of her cousin who would soon become her husband — despite the fact she couldn’t speak a word of English.
“I felt like a bird flying out of a cage,” Ms. Mannarino recalls with a smile. “It was an awesome feeling.”
From dream to reality
After marrying Gerald Mannarino in 1975, she helped make ends meet by waiting tables in a diner and sewing uniforms for mine workers. Their son, Jamie, was born in 1977, after which Ms. Mannarino became a stay-at-home mom.
It wasn’t until 1989, after working at Simply French in Oakland and managing a Chinese restaurant in Coraopolis, that Ms. Mannarino had the seminal “now what?” moment that lead to her opening her pierogi business.
With Jamie in school all day, “I was thinking about what I wanted to do with my life — get a job or open my own place,” she recalls. “I prayed to God to lead me.”
Before she left Warsaw, Ms. Mannarino had spent hours in her Aunt Eva’s small family diner working as a cook, cleaner and delivery girl. She’d also had great success, after moving to Pittsburgh, selling her homemade pierogi — a treasured taste of home — and other Eastern European dishes to friends and neighbors. So maybe, just maybe, a long-held dream of one day opening her own Polish restaurant wasn’t that crazy.
When a friend told her about a course offering self-employment training and funding for would-be entrepreneurs by the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh, she saw a chance. To her surprise, she ended up being one of just 15 from a crowd of more than 200 who attended the informational meeting to be accepted into the program.
A mentor advised Ms. Mannarino to focus on selling just two items to help keep overhead low and the business plan easy. She quickly settled on pierogi and stuffed cabbage, “made the way we want to eat them — with love, the way mom and grandma made them” back in Poland.
Not so easy was finding an affordable location to sell the traditional Polish eats.
The populous Eastern European communities of Lawrenceville and Polish Hill seemed like a natural, but even 30 years ago, “rents were so high,” she says. So when her husband suggested that she put the restaurant in the empty gas station with leaky gas tanks that he owned in McKees Rocks, she agreed.
She used the Americanized spelling for pierogi in her new company name’s, she says, “because ‘ie’ is the American way. Sometimes people correct me, but we’re selling American.”
It would take two entire years to clean up the building and equip it with auction finds covered by a $5,000 loan from the Small Business Association before a single pierogi was pinched — during which time the couple separated, and Ms. Mannarino’s dream briefly went up in smoke.
“I was afraid to go on,” she admits. But with the business plan in place, quitting was not an option.
Her deep faith also propelled her forward. “I said, ‘OK God. If you are with me, I’ll do it.’ ”
A quick road to success
When Pierogies Plus finally opened for business in 1991, Ms. Mannarino had one friend, Bert Wojdowski, helping her peel potatoes and chop onions for free. And she only sold four kinds of pierogi (potato and cheese, sauerkraut, cottage cheese and meat) on Tuesdays and Fridays so she could “see how it goes.”
The answer was so swimmingly that, little by little, Ms. Mannarino not only had to add staff, but also increased production to six days a week, which became overwhelming for just about everyone.
“So I decided to give ourselves a break” and cut back to selling just Monday through Friday.
The shop’s success is still a little amazing to Ms. Mannarino; although pierogi arrived in Pittsburgh along with the Eastern European immigrants who settled here in the 19th and 20th centuries to work in the steel and coal industries, they weren’t exactly the popular nosh they are today among a wider population.
Ms. Mannarino attributes a lot of the company’s success to two appearances on the Food Network — “Food Finds” in 2003 followed by “FoodNation with Bobby Flay” in 2004.
The national shout-out prompted so many phone calls for orders, “I thought the line was stuck,” she says. “It put us on the map.”
In 2006, Ms. Mannarino was busy enough that she was able to enlarge the original 350-square-foot store to include a new cooking system, a large walk-in cooler and freezer and a remodeled production area. With pierogi now considered a must-have Pittsburgh food, Pierogies Plus has also expanded its offerings to include more than 40 varieties along with soups, sandwiches, crab cakes and various desserts — and they’re shipped nationwide.
Many of Ms. Mannarino’s staff of 18 (mostly female) employees are veteran pierogi-makers from her native Poland, along with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, who share her values of hard work and passion for Eastern European food traditions. They include her sister Grace, and at one time her mother, Julia Balik, who worked there for more than 20 years before her death in 2013 and was her number one cheerleader.
Some have been there for more than a decade while others are recent enough that they still don’t speak English.
“They’re hard workers, diligent and show up every day,” she says of her employees. She says she finds it a blessing to be able to make a difference in their lives and serve as a role model.
Still going strong
The store has gone from cooking around 50 pounds of Idaho potatoes a week to between 200 and 350 pounds a day, depending on the season. It’s busiest in the weeks leading up to Christmas — the phone starts ringing the Monday after Thanksgiving and continues until they stop taking orders two weeks before Santa’s arrival. The six-week Lenten season is intense, too, thanks to pierogi being a popular fish fry side.
Ms. Mannarino credits her longevity both to her faith, and her egg-enriched dough recipe, which includes two different kinds of flour along with canola oil and is made fresh each night so it’s ready when the pinchers arrive at 7 a.m. Potatoes are also boiled and peeled at midnight and all the pierogi — more than 1,000 dozen a week — are boiled before being bagged by the dozen so customers only need to reheat before serving.
Each pincher has his or her individual style. When they’re lined up on an orange lunch tray for packing, Ms. Mannarino can tell which ones were made by whom.
Now, as then, the business is takeout only; you place orders through a window under an overhang that back in the day sheltered gas pumps. You also can find Pierogies Plus dumplings at any number of Pittsburgh markets, bars and restaurants, including Gooski’s, Redbeards and the Westin Convention Center Pittsburgh. There’s a special menu for groups holding fundraisers, too. (About 40% of the business is wholesale.)
Given that so many churches — her main competition when she started — are no longer in the pierogi-making business, you might might also find the comfort food on your plate at a Friday night fish fry during Lent. One church this year ordered 1,700 dozen for their dinners.
“The younger generation doesn’t have the time or interest” to make them like church ladies, she says.
Ms. Mannarino doesn’t plan to step down anytime soon. “I’ll make them as long as I’m healthy,” she says, adding, “there’s no retirement in the Bible.”
It’s hard work, but it’s also incredibly rewarding because so many get so excited about getting pierogi.
“This is the thing, the truth,” Ms. Mannarino says. “We like to make people happy.”
First Published: April 13, 2025, 8:00 a.m.
Updated: April 14, 2025, 2:51 p.m.
