A particularly flavorful piece of Europe has arrived in Pinellas County. Nubo Café & Bakery is now open at 420 Cleveland Street in Clearwater after debuting last week. It’s run by Oleksandr Kozlenko and his wife, Oksana, who relocated from Ukraine to the United States in 2024 and built the café around the food, hospitality, and traditions they carried with them. Everything on the menu is made from scratch. Sauces, fillings, and pastries. All of it. There’s no frozen-shortcut version of anything here.
The name itself is doing a lot of heavy lifting. In Ukrainian, “Nubo” carries the spirit of “Let’s go,” “Come on,” and “Don’t give up.” When you consider what it truly means to leave your country and rebuild, that café name hits harder than “Starbucks,” which was named after a whale ship. Point: Nubo.
Photos via Nubo
The menu reads like a love letter to Ukrainian home cooking. Borshch is served with sour cream, cured pork fat, adjika, rye bread, and green onions. Varenyky come stuffed with potato, mushrooms, cabbage, beef, cherries, or cottage cheese. There’s deruny, syrnyky, cabbage rolls, three-meat pelmeni, and a chilled kefir soup called okroshka loaded with cucumbers, radishes, potatoes, eggs, ham, and dill. On the beverage side, there’s espresso, matcha, chai, pistachio cream lattes, and something called Ukrainian uzvar, a drink made from smoked pears, apples, and dried fruit, which sounds like the most elegant thing tea ever aspired to be…