Edmonton’s DON’YA Kitchen will be featured in Dragon’s Den

IT’s another busy day at DON’YA Ukrainian Kitchen in the north side of Edmonton as cooks are preparing for a lunch rush.

One of the cooks is Nataliia Vynohradova, she fled from Ukraine to Canada in January 2023 to find a safe place for her family. She never dreamt of leaving her hometown.

“I need to be safe because when the war started, my youngest son asked me, ‘Mom are we going to die?’ For me, it was ‘I need to do something,’” said Vynohradova.

She later joined DON’YA Ukrainian Kitchen in June of 2023 when the first retail store opened at Fort Road in June of 2023. Vynohradova is just one of more than a dozen women fleeing from Ukraine, who serves as a cook offering authentic Ukrainian dishes.

“They gathered together to make Varenyky just to show Canadians a new Ukrainian culture,” said Vynohradova.

Now her cooking skills and the products they offer will be featured in a reality show Dragon’s Den, something that she did not expect coming here.

“For me, it’s like – a little bit exciting … I hope after that, we will grow and rise, we will have our kitchen to be bigger and more people will try our food,” said Vynohradova.

It was not a kitchen at the beginning. In 2022, this was a donation centre for Ukrainian newcomers; since then, it became a kitchen, opening its first store in Fort Road and recently at Jasper Avenue. 

“We are so excited, I have goosebumps even when just talking about it,” said Janie Krissa, the co-founder DON’YA Ukrainian Kitchen.

Krissa decided to audition as people from different parts of the country, including one in Australia, encouraged her to franchise the business, but she needed funding. She hopes that Dragon’s Den will be a way to expand their store to 300 in the next ten years.

“We know that we’ve got something really special. We don’t just have a product, we have a story and a product,” said Krissa.

The kitchen will offer the typical dish of perogies and cabbage rolls, but there are still some cuisines that are still a secret.

“We are discussing that now about the big menu that we’re going to have,” said Krissa.

Her team will fly to Toronto on May 8th, with the filming happening after Mother’s Day and will air between October to January.