Immigrant Kitchen’s Ukrainian Dinner

Viktoriia Panova speaks about her experience immigrating to Minnesota while co-founder Mecca Bos looks on. Photo Sarah Whiting

Immigrant Kitchen, a ticketed dinner series created by the nonprofit BIPOC Foodways Alliance, hosted in July its first of five free dinner events this year. Co-founder Mecca Bos’s mission for the program is “to create unity between cultural communities using food as a tool,” highlighting authentic cuisine cooked by women of that culture.

“After immigrant communities started getting vilified in the news, we made a more intentional effort to build our events co-hosted with immigrant women, and to showcase their cultural legacy stories through the lens of food, but also to tell their own stories their own way,” says Bos.

Many of the women who cook at these events are home cooks, found through word of mouth. These women often use recipes from previous generations, passed down through oral tradition, and share the kitchen with younger members of their family.

Photo Sarah Whiting

“Home cooking is a really important cultural asset, so it’s on the backs of women who insist on making sure that these traditions are passed down throughout generation after generation,” Bos says. “We never get involved with what they want to cook, or what they want to talk about. We just support. We help them in the kitchen to scale up their home cooking for 75 people; they truly are experts at what they do.”

Photo Sarah Whiting

Bos wants to ensure the dinner events are affordable for everyone, so the people receiving the meal are as diverse as the team behind the food. Thanks to a grant from the Minnesota Humanities Center, Immigrant Kitchen will have three more free dinners in 2026, having also recently included a dinner with food from Cameroon. 

The Ukrainian dinner was hosted at the Lynette restaurant in the Longfellow neighborhood. It featured four courses cooked by Viktoriia Panova, who left her home city of Donetsk soon after it was occupied by Russia. After living in many other cities away from home, she eventually immigrated to the U.S. and plunged into work at restaurants and bars without knowing English. She moved to Minnesota three years ago. Utilizing a degree in food technology, and her lifelong experience cooking for family, she co-owns the food truck Kozak Corner, which operates out of Kramarczuk’s Sausage Co. 

Panova created her food truck less out of a desire to cook, but because she missed her community in Donetsk. After talking with many Ukrainian immigrants in Minnesota, she found many of them felt the same.

“I realized here are a lot of Ukrainians, and they are missing a lot of things from Ukraine. They lost families, home, friends, and parents,” she says. “I cannot give these people that back, but at least what I can give is a taste of our childhood, a taste of our home.” 

Panova says every Ukrainian meal contains two ingredients: heart and love.

First course: garden salad with homemade garlic dressing and traditional pickled vegetables. Photo Sarah Whiting

At the event, guests were able to take home leftovers. Panova crafted dishes such as potato and cheese dumplings, Ukrainian sausage with homemade garlic dill sauce, and zefir, a marshmallow-like dessert. She also shared witty anecdotes in between courses.

Although there were supposed to be 100 pounds of potatoes for the event, and she received 20, attendees left feeling full — both from the food as well as connecting with neighbors they wouldn’t have met otherwise.

“Food is one of the easiest ways to learn about another culture,” says Panova. “Through food, you learn about traditions, family, childhood memories, and the way people live. I hope people enjoy the food, of course, but I also hope they leave feeling a little more connected to Ukrainian culture and to the people behind it.” 

Photo Sarah Whiting

Learn more

• bipocfoodways.org/immigrant-kitchen
• Viktoriia’s story in more detail
• substack.com/@meccabos
• @kozak_corner

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