A Ukrainian Couple Builds a New Life in Chicago, While Maintaining Their Business and Employees Back Home

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When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Artur and Iryna Yuzivik had just finished a vacation in the Dominican Republic. With flights back to their native Ukraine cancelled, they were stuck at J.F.K. airport in New York City. Iryna was five months pregnant with their first child. They decided to stay in the U.S. rather than take the risk of returning to a battle-ridden country to have a baby. 

The war has dragged on, lasting longer than World War I and becoming the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II. But Artur and Iryna were determined to continue building the lives they had begun in 2016 as the owners of a coffee roaster in Ukraine that they named Soloway, Ukrainian for a black bird “that wakes up with you every morning,” says Artur. As they transferred their ambitions to the U.S., the English “solo way,” forging one’s own path, also resonated. After months on the East Coast, they visited Chicago and decided that this rather than New York was the city in which they wanted to live and open a Soloway Coffee cafe.

“Two months later we moved in, and another five months later we opened [our] first location [in] Lincoln Park,” Artur says.  

That was three years ago. The Yuziviks have since opened Abrah Bakery & Daily Bistro next to their original cafe on Lincoln Avenue as well as a second Soloway on Damen Avenue in Bucktown. That’s in addition to the two coffee shops they still run in Ukraine and the roaster there that supplies them and their establishments in Chicago, despite missile bombardments, power outages, and supply chain issues that affect even western Ukraine, where the roaster is located, relatively far from the war’s frontlines.

“This is our identity, and we are not planning to stop our business,” says Artur, noting that they employ some 60 people in Ukraine. “It becomes more and more difficult to do it, but we decided, this is our story, this is who we are, and there is no chance that we will leave it.” 

As part of that story, the Yuziviks are once again hosting a celebration of Ukrainian Independence Day at Abrah the afternoon of August 23, the day before the equivalent of the Fourth of July for Ukrainians. The holiday commemorates the adoption of a Declaration of Independence in 1991 that established an independent Ukrainian state after decades under the Soviet Union, which dissolved at the end of that year and became modern Russia. 

There will be a DJ playing Ukrainian music, Ukrainian-inspired cocktails, kombucha-like kvass lemonade, and two versions of Kyiv cake, a hazelnut-meringue-and-buttercream confection that became a popular (and rare) treat in Ukraine during years of deprivation under the USSR. 

“We as a business have to be the first ones to remind Ukrainians this is very important, to remember where you’re coming from, to remember your traditions and to understand that Ukraine still exists, the war is not over yet,” says Artur. 

But Abrah and the Soloway cafes are not aimed exclusively at Ukrainians. They are modern and trendy, as befits their neighborhoods, but the Yuziviks maintain some Ukrainian dishes on their menus: the farmer’s cheese dumplings gombóvtsi, sweet cherry varenyky dumplings, borscht, buckwheat honey cake. Everything is made in-house from scratch.

“We try to show Chicago…that Ukrainian-inspired food is really, really good quality,” Artur says.

They’re not the only ones: Cook County has the second largest population of Ukrainians in the United States, and a small number of Ukrainian restaurants, including Anelya from the high-profile team of Beverly Kim and Johnny Clark; Clark’s grandmother, after whom the restaurant is named, was Ukrainian.

But there’s still little exposure to Ukrainian culture despite that large population, particularly outside of small pockets of immigrants in Ukrainian Village or the suburbs. Soloway’s locations in Lincoln Park and Bucktown are thus an opportunity. Artur says he and his wife’s businesses have been warmly welcomed; they named Abrah after Lincoln Park’s namesake, Abraham Lincoln. 

“We try to be very tight with the community and we try to become a central neighborhood spot for meet-ups,” he says. “We have a lot of really, really good guests, neighbors, families, friends. We met a lot of people at Soloway ourselves, and we are very proud to work in Lincoln Park.”

The Yuziviks have come to love Chicago and want to continue expanding throughout the city, sharing their pastries and their coffee and maybe even a little bit of their story as they do so.

“We will keep growing Soloway Coffee, but the coffee itself will [continue to] be proudly roasted and transported all over from Ukraine,” Artur says.