PITTSBURGH — Olive Visco has always loved to cook the old-school Polish foods she grew up on, sometimes even for friends in her adopted city of Pittsburgh. But until the COVID-19 pandemic stymied her career as a bar manager, the Venango County, Pennsylvania, native never dreamed she’d make an actual living from rolling, folding and pinching her maternal grandmother Statia’s recipe for pierogi and selling them via social media under the handle @polsaklaskapgh. Upon earning a degree at Chatham University in 2016, “I wanted to make food videos or maybe be a PR person for a restaurant,” she says.
After falling in love with the city’s burgeoning food scene, she instead ended up working both front and back of house jobs at Downtown’s now-closed Union Standard. Visco had just lost her next job as bar manager at Iron Born Pizza in the summer of 2020 when she started selling her homemade pierogi on Instagram. Unemployment checks were slow to arrive, “and I needed to make money” to cover rent for the Bloomfield apartment she shared with her pugs, Oyster and Mussels.
“So I thought, ‘What am I really good at?'” While most of the restaurant jobs she’d taken since age 15 involved waitressing or bussing tables, she’d also worked on the line at Iron Born before taking over its bar program in 2019. So while she’d never cooked for a living per se, she wasn’t a complete novice either. In fact, growing up on a 100-acre llama farm in Franklin with “pretty hippie .
