Cleveland Classics: As Historic Restaurants Shutter, Marie’s Is Still Dishing Up Quality Comfort Food Four Decades In

When Balaton Hungarian restaurant announced this past January that it was closing after 60 years, I reluctantly shared the news with my father. For decades, he owned an auto parts store on Buckeye Road, a short mile west of the restaurant’s original location. He and a friend met there for lunch every single Friday until the `90s, when the restaurant relocated to Shaker Square. When I revisited Balaton for this paper back in 2018, I did so with my father sitting across the table. You never know when you’re enjoying something for the last time, and for my father, that was the case that day.

By now we’re sadly familiar with the sudden anger, grief and regret that comes from losing one of our beloved local restaurants. And while the first two emotions are predictable, it’s the regret that stings. If only I had dined there a little more frequently, we say to ourselves, would that have made a difference? Yet, even after two and a half years of this slow-motion trainwreck, we still take so many of our community treasures for granted until it’s too late. Which leads to the next unavoidable emotion: guilt.

Take Marie’s Restaurant, which has been quietly chugging along since 1982. Will you be sad if it closed its doors tomorrow? Have you dined there recently? Have you ever eaten there? I, for one, had not, so I rounded up some friends and made a night of it. We ate until we were stuffed, drank until we were rowdy, and tipped excessively. But will that be enough to tip the scales in favor of continued survival?

“We’re trying,” says owner Tanya Sabljic. “It’s not easy, that’s for sure. But knock on wood, we’re still here. And we’re going to keep trying and going until we can’t.”

I will never have the opportunity to interview Mila “Marie” Sabljic, the matriarch who opened the restaurant on St. Clair, back when that area was home to one of the largest Croatian and Slovenian communities in the U.S. Sabljic passed away last year, but Tanya and her sister-in-law Anna and the rest of the family have no intention of packing up.

“We’ve been doing it for all these years,” Tanya says. “You can’t just give up.”

Little at Marie’s has changed since the start. Guests can still count on a warm welcome, gracious service and huge portions of family-style Eastern European food. The menu is loaded with comfort food staples like beef goulash, chicken paprikash, stuffed cabbage, liver and onions, and wiener schnitzel. Those items are joined by a few curveballs like chicken marsala and shrimp alfredo.

“It’s still the same menu,” says Tanya. “Even our daily specials are the same. I think we only added two things since we opened. I think that’s one of the things that people love about us; we don’t change. Even after mom passed away, we just try to do it like she did it.”

Every meal should include an order of the cevapi ($15.75), grilled, casing-free sausages made from beef, pork and veal. The boldly flavored sausages are served with raw white onion to cut through the richness. Entrees like the luscious beef goulash ($16) and the earthy but sweet liver and onions ($14.75) come with a choice of noodles or dumplings. Only a fool chooses the packaged noodles over the pudgy homemade dumplings that arrive the size of gnocchi. Some dishes, like the stuffed cabbage, stuffed peppers and chicken paprikash, appear only on their assigned day of the week. Most meals come with a choice of simple side salad or bowl of chicken noodle soup and all the fresh bread and real butter you care to eat.

If you’ve never been before, like me, you’d be wise to order the combo platter ($23), an intimidating stack of meats that includes cevapi, breaded pork chop, wiener schnitzel and city chicken. For those who didn’t grow up in Cleveland, city chicken is a Depression-era holdover of skewered, breaded and pan-fried pork. Yes, pork. Here, it is grilled – and excellent.

We knocked back bombers of Croatian doppelbock ($7) in a largely empty dining room, wondering if we just happened to catch the restaurant at a quiet time. Like Balaton before it, Marie’s has watched as its once-loyal clientele has moved farther and farther east, if they’re even still with us.

“There were lots of Croatian people, Slovenian people, but everybody moved out,” adds Tanya. “And we had so many people who used to work downtown and would come here for lunch, but they retired or switched jobs. They still come back occasionally.”

Here in Cleveland, one of our favorite pastimes is to wax nostalgic about dearly departed restaurants. Let’s do a little more on the front end so we have fewer to mourn.

Marie’s Restaurant
4502 St. Clair Ave., Cleveland
216-361-1816
mariesrestaurant.net

Correction: August 1, 2022
An earlier version of this article stated that Balaton relocated to Shaker Square in the 1980s. It was edited to read the 1990s.