A Winter Kitchen in Almaty
Picture a kitchen in Kazakhstan in the middle of winter.
The whole family is gathered around the table, rolling dough by hand, folding and pinching the edges of pelmeni one by one. When the trays are full, someone carries them outside to freeze in the cold air. No freezer needed. The temperature did the work.
That’s where Elena DeYoung learned to cook. Not from a recipe card. Not from a culinary school. From being in the kitchen, watching, helping, tasting, and remembering.
She didn’t inherit recipes. She inherited flavors.
The Long Road to Boise
Elena grew up in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in a neighborhood where Russian, Armenian, Korean, and German families lived side by side. The food reflected that. A Korean neighbor’s carrot salad became a staple at every gathering. An Armenian friend’s shashlik marinade was the one everyone requested. The cuisine Elena grew up with wasn’t a single tradition. It was the result of people sharing what they knew.
She eventually made her way to Brooklyn, then Portland, and finally to Boise in 2004. She brought the food with her, the way you bring anything that’s part of who you are.
What she didn’t expect was how many people in Boise had never tasted it before, and how much they wanted to.
The Festival That Started Everything
It began with a family at her church trying to raise money to adopt a child. Elena offered to cook. The event was a success. People came back the following year, and the year after that.
What started as a small fundraiser grew into the Russian Food Festival, a Boise tradition that Elena helped found and ran for 17 years, eventually drawing around 4,000 people annually. For many of those attendees, it was their first introduction to Russian and Central Asian food. For Elena, it was a masterclass in cooking at scale.
You can get a sense of what that event became by watching this video from the Russian Food Festival.
“It was here that I really learned how to develop flavor, cook for a crowd and hone the skills I would need to run a restaurant.” – Elena D.
Every year, after the festival ended and the crowd went home, Elena heard the same thing.
Why can we only find this food once a year? We want to eat it every day.
For years, she didn’t have an answer. Then in 2019, she finally did.
Opening Alyonka
Elena opened Alyonka Russian Cuisine at 2870 W State St in Boise in 2019. The name comes from a classic Russian fairy tale character, a young girl known for her warmth and resourcefulness. It suits the place.
The menu she built reflects the same multicultural kitchen she grew up in. The koreiskaya morkovka (Korean-style carrot salad) traces back to her Korean neighbors in Almaty. The shashlik marinade came from her Armenian friend’s family. The borscht, the pelmeni, the plov, the medovik honey cake — all of it comes from memory, from decades of cooking this food for people she loved.
Nothing on the menu comes from a can. Nothing is reheated. Everything is made the day it’s served.
You can read more about what it’s like to eat at Alyonka and what keeps people coming back.
What Makes This Place Different
Most restaurants have an owner. Alyonka has Elena.
She’s usually in the kitchen or on the floor, and often both. She’s the one who made your borscht this morning. She’s also the one who might take your order tonight.
As one Google reviewer put it:
“It’s not often that the head chef and owner of the restaurant also waits your table, but that happens here, and it was a treat.” — Taylor K., Google Review
That’s not a quirk of the business model. That’s just who Elena is. The food is personal because she is personal. The two aren’t separate.
Why She Still Does It
Elena is a three-time award-winning chef who could have taken her skills in a dozen different directions. She chose this one. A small restaurant on West State Street, making food from scratch every day, for a city that spent years asking when it could have it.
The question people kept asking at the festival, year after year, wasn’t just about the food. It was about wanting something real. Something made by someone who knew what they were doing and cared about getting it right.
Alyonka is the answer to that question.
If you haven’t been yet, it’s worth the visit. If you have, you already know why people keep coming back.
Reservations are available at 208-344-8996. Alyonka is at 2870 W State St, Boise. The pelmeni sells out on weekends, so plan accordingly.
