There is a grandfather clock inside La Valse des Fleurs that no longer tells time. It came from another chapter of Elina Paliakova’s life, before the café (which we covered in an article titled Inside the Old Englewood Bank That Became La Valse des Fleurs), before the flowers and Limoges porcelain and silver spoons, before an old bank in Englewood became a place where roses turn up in drinks and customers sometimes announce that they have no intention of telling their friends what they have found. The clock wasn’t working when Elina received it. Her husband repaired it and brought it back to life. Then, sometime after it arrived at the café, it stopped again. Elina decided she rather liked it that way.
“Time has always meant something to me,” she says. “How quickly it passes, how much we postpone, how much we think we still have ahead of us.” This is one of those statements that can sound philosophical until you know the circumstances that produced it. Years before La Valse des Fleurs existed, someone close to Elina died young and unexpectedly. Until then, she had been living within the familiar architecture of adult responsibility. She worked, earned a salary, followed a routine and assumed that the more creative life she imagined could be dealt with later. The loss changed her relationship with that word.
“I think what changed in me was a sudden awareness of how short and unpredictable life really is,” she says. “Of course, we all know that in theory, but when you lose someone young and unexpectedly, it becomes very real.”
There was no dramatic resignation the following morning, no café sketched on a napkin, no single moment when she decided to become an entrepreneur. In fact, she didn’t initially imagine a café at all. She considered a photography studio. Then a flower shop. Perhaps there could be coffee. She began taking barista classes and signed up for baking classes, and her training eventually took her to Italy for hands-on experience in a Michelin-starred restaurant. The idea kept expanding until the little flower shop with coffee became something much more ambitious. “There wasn’t one dramatic moment when I decided, ‘I’m doing this,’” she says. “I think I simply stopped allowing myself to keep postponing it.”
“I think I simply stopped allowing myself to keep postponing it.”
The story had actually begun much earlier, in Belarus, where Elina was born and earned a law degree before moving to the United States roughly twenty years ago. She arrived without speaking English. She hadn’t established a legal career long enough to feel she was abandoning one, though she understood something familiar to immigrants: the strange reset of leaving a place where your history already explains who you are and arriving somewhere where you must establish yourself again.
Through ESL programs, she began taking classes available to her despite the language barrier. There was photography, drawing and art. Teachers encouraged her. She had always loved photography but had never thought of herself as particularly artistic. In those classrooms, she began discovering a part of herself that had apparently been waiting for permission. Looking backward now, she can assign a role to almost every apparent detour. Law gave her structure and organization. Art and photography taught her how to see. Flowers introduced another form of composition. Coffee and culinary training gave her the mechanics required to turn all of it into hospitality.
In 90 seconds, meet the woman behind La Valse des Fleurs and the memories, influences and unexpected turns that eventually found their way into the world she created.
There were older influences waiting underneath those, too. As a child, Elina spent summers with her sisters at her grandmother’s house. Her grandmother was a botanist whose garden contained more than two hundred varieties of flowers. She kept the children occupied with games, concerts, fashion shows and craft projects, and sewed little backpacks for them to carry into the forest, where they collected rose hips, wild thyme, St. John’s wort and other herbs. In the evenings, they drank tea while their grandmother told stories. In the mornings, there were stacks of blini, thin crêpes, and one of the girls would go outside to pick fresh berries.
Those memories have crossed an ocean. Crêpes with berries appear on the menu at La Valse des Fleurs. So does Golden Cockerel soup, a clear chicken broth served with a crêpe that comes directly from her grandmother. The flowers followed, too. Elina’s mother inherited the family’s fascination with them and now grows many varieties of roses. None of these things appears to have been consciously preserved for a future business. They simply remained.
Elina began ballroom dancing at six and continued for about fifteen years. Her mother sewed her long dresses. Her childhood contained music and movement, dramatic fabric and performance, and she developed an affection for classical music, opera and ballet, chandeliers, antiques and the visual romance of another era. At around eleven, another world entered the picture when she began traveling regularly to France. She remembers Bordeaux and Paris, old houses and castles, vineyards, villages, bakeries, her first croissant and the morning ritual of buying a baguette. She remembers croque monsieur packed by her French host family for excursions. Most of all, she remembers that meals were given time. People sat around a table and talked.
France became less a place she wanted to imitate than an idea about how life could be lived. “La Valse des Fleurs became my own interpretation of it,” she says, “a place where beauty matters, but so does slowing down, gathering around the table and enjoying the moment.”
Perhaps the clearest expression of that philosophy is sitting on the tables. Elina collects china and silverware, including a Limoges porcelain set that was among her first finds. She once treated beautiful objects the way many families do, preserving them for holidays and important occasions. Eventually, she began questioning the arrangement. Why should the good cup spend most of its existence behind glass? Why should the silver spoon wait for Christmas?
“Why should beauty wait for a holiday?” she asks. “Our everyday life is our life.”
Customers occasionally recognize a piece of china and tell her that their mother or grandmother owns something similar. Elina asks whether they use it. Often, they don’t. We save an extraordinary amount of life for someday: the china, the dress, the trip, the idea, the work we really want to do when circumstances become more accommodating. Elina has become suspicious of someday.
“Why should beauty wait for a holiday? Our everyday life is our life.”
There is another person threaded through nearly every part of this story. When I asked which part of La Valse des Fleurs belongs to her husband, Ruslan , Elina answered, “I belong to him.” Then she explained. She does not describe herself as naturally self-confident. She was willing to take the financial and emotional risk of creating something, though she continued to wonder whether the idea would work and whether she was capable of pulling it off. Ruslan kept telling her that she could. When the idea grew into a full café, he took on the kitchen. He also did much of the renovation himself, including the build-out, furniture, counter and equipment installation.
His presence appears in smaller ways, too. When Elina first met him, he arrived at her door with red roses. Later, when he was traveling from Chicago to visit her, he asked what she wanted him to bring. She jokingly requested the scarlet flower, a reference to a fairy tale from her childhood with echoes of Beauty and the Beast. He returned with a rose fashioned into an answer. Years later, roses appeared on the logo of the business they created together and throughout its drinks, pastries and design.
“His work, his hands, and his belief in me are woven into the whole place,” she says.
Elina Paliakova talks with The Bergen Society about the childhood memories, unexpected turns, and people that shaped her life, and how they eventually found their way into La Valse des Fleurs.
Watch our conversation with Elina Paliakova inside La Valse des Fleurs, where she talks about France, family, flowers, risk and the unlikely collection of experiences that eventually became her Englewood café.
There is one more object worth returning to. The grandfather clock came from Elina’s previous working life, a physical bridge between the person she had been and the one she was becoming. Ruslan repaired it. It worked for a while. Then it stopped.
Elina wants the business she built around it to grow. She understands that romance does not exempt a business from arithmetic. She wants financial stability, more experiences, better service and enough resources to keep developing the ideas she carries around. She can imagine La Valse des Fleurs eventually existing in other towns or cities. She hopes people will know the name and plan visits in advance.
What she doesn’t want is for growth to make the place feel less personal. The café was built from memories that were never intended to become a business plan: a botanist grandmother, wild herbs gathered in a forest, ballroom dresses sewn by her mother, a childhood Eiffel Tower, France at eleven, a law degree, art classes taken because she didn’t yet speak English, a death that made postponement feel dangerous, and a husband who arrived carrying roses.
The clock stands among all of it, permanently relieved of its original responsibility. Outside, there will always be another appointment, another email, another obligation and another reason to put something off until circumstances improve. Inside, Elina serves food on the china people usually save, while the clock insists that nobody needs to know exactly what time it is.
There may be worse ways to spend an ordinary Tuesday.
