Park Ridge-area patrons will be able to get a taste of European sweets when they visit Lemon Tiramisu, a newly-opened bakery on Northwest Highway which offers a wide range of baked goods originating in regions from France to Ukraine.
The bakery, owned by Vita Yakymyshyna, offers cookies, cakes, cupcakes and Ukrainian goodies including traditional zephyrs, pirozhki and traditional Ukrainian white bread.
Lemon Tiramisu is Ukrainian immigrant Yakymyshyna’s first business, and it’s something that she was encouraged to pursue when friends and family were blown away by her talent as a baker, despite her informal education and the fact she learned recipes by word of mouth and generationally.
“It’s probably in my blood,” Yakymyshyna said. Her mother was a sous chef, and her grandmother was also baker, she said, who taught her how to bake pirozhki, a Ukrainian bun filled with apple, peach or raspberry jam, at Lemon Tiramisu, and paska bread, a traditional Ukrainian treat prepared for Easter.
Yakymyshyna said she envisions the bakery as being a place for socializing, with seating for 13 and afternoon hours. She said Ukrainian bakeries are usually a mix of baked goods and cafes with meals and are usually open all day, but as a one-person operation, she wants to start with something more manageable. She said she has seen potential customers peek through the bakery’s windows before the 11 a.m. start time, which has led her to consider changing the hours of operation.
Yakymyshyna said her bakery’s menu is about half Ukrainian and half from other European countries with baked goods such as croissants and tiramisu. Vanilla and chocolate cakes are also on the menu, and so is a specialty spinach cake with spinach in the middle with lemon juice and raspberry icing. Yakymyshyna said the cake was created by a Ukrainian acquaintance during the time she lived in Europe.
Lemon Tiramisu, the bakery’s namesake, came from a suggestion made by a friend who ate it in Italy, and Yakymyshyna was later able to recreate it. Anastasia Lisova, one of Yakymyshyna’s daughters, said the bakery was named after the dish because tiramisu is such a popular dish, but lemon tiramisu isn’t so well known.
The bakery currently only serves lemon and traditional coffee-flavored tiramisu, but Yakymyshyna said she hopes to expand to add strawberry, raspberry, apple with mint, mango and lime tiramisu in the future.
Before Yakymyshyna began planning her business in Park Ridge in September 2023, she had worked for four years as a nuclear medicine technologist at St. Anthony’s Hospital. The job was at times hard on her mentally because of the condition she would see young people in, some even knowing that they would die soon. “Always when I came home, I was super upset. It’s really hard for me personally. It’s not like I cannot do it… but when I see how hard it is on me, I started to think I needed to change something because it’s something that’s been eating me,” she said.
On those drives to and from work, Yakymyshyna spotted the bakery’s location at 1027 Northwest Highway in Park Ridge.
The bakery’s hours are from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays, 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Sundays.
