Why Pierogi Shops and Eastern European Restaurants Lose Their Christmas Eve Pre-Orders on the Phone (2026)

2026-10-16 · Industry · 6 min read

Ask anyone who runs a pierogi shop or a small Polish or Ukrainian restaurant when the year gets made, and most will say the same thing: the six weeks before Christmas Eve. Families who would never cook twelve dishes from scratch still want the table to look like it did at their grandmother's house, and a lot of them pick up the phone to order it.

That phone is the weak spot. In most of these kitchens the people who take the calls are the same people rolling dough, filling dumplings and running the counter. When the holiday orders start, the line rings far more often than anyone can answer it.

The holiday rush starts in October, not December

Regulars know that the best pickup times go early, so the first wave of calls arrives in late October and early November. They want to know when the order cutoff is, whether the shop does Wigilia packages again this year, and whether the borscht for Christmas Eve can be picked up on the 23rd instead of the 24th.

The volume then builds through December. A shop in Chicago, Toronto, Winnipeg or Cleveland that might take a handful of phone orders on a normal Tuesday can see dozens a day in mid-December, plus a second, smaller wave in early January from families who keep Christmas on January 7. Every one of those calls is someone who has already decided to buy.

What the calls actually look like

Most holiday calls are orders by the dozen: three dozen potato and cheese, two dozen sauerkraut and mushroom, a dozen sweet cheese, frozen or cooked. Then come the add-ons, such as uszka, a quart of red borscht, a pan of cabbage rolls, poppy seed roll, kutia. A single call can easily run four or five minutes once the caller works through the list for the whole family.

Pickup timing is the other half of the call. Christmas Eve pickups bunch into a narrow window, usually late morning to early afternoon on the 23rd and 24th, and the shop needs to spread them out or the line out the door gets out of hand. That means asking every caller for a time slot, a name and a phone number, and getting them right.

Then there are the bigger requests: a parish hall dinner, an office party tray, a fundraiser that wants 40 dozen frozen pierogi. These are worth a lot, but they need a real conversation with the owner about quantities, dates and price.

Why the phone breaks at these places

Pierogi are made by hand, and hands covered in flour do not answer phones. During a production day the choice is between stopping the line to take an order or letting it ring. Most shops let it ring, and voicemail fills up by mid-afternoon. Some callers leave a message. Many hang up and try another shop, or decide to make do with frozen supermarket pierogi this year.

Messages also create work of their own. Someone has to listen to each one, call back, and often play phone tag with a customer who is now at work. Orders taken from a rushed callback or a scribbled note are where the wrong filling or the wrong pickup day sneaks in, and on Christmas Eve there is no time to fix it.

What an AI phone agent can take off the counter

An AI phone agent answers every call, including when three come in at once, so nobody has to leave the dough to grab the phone. On RingFoods' Professional plan ($200/month, 500 minutes) the agent can take the order itself, using the shop's own menu, and send it through to Square or Toast. The Basic plan ($100/month, 200 minutes) does not take orders, but it still answers questions and books times.

For holiday pre-orders, the useful part is the structure. The agent asks for each item and quantity, offers the pickup slots that are still open, takes a name and number, and then reads the whole order back before confirming. The caller gets an SMS confirmation, and the shop gets a clean written order instead of a voicemail to decode.

It can also handle the questions that eat up time on the counter: what the cutoff date is, whether an item is sold out, frozen versus cooked, holiday hours, parking. It can answer in many callers' own languages, which matters in neighbourhoods where some regulars are more comfortable in Polish or Ukrainian than in English. It is worth testing that with a few regulars before the rush, since accents and family names vary.

Where it still falls short

The agent does not take payment over the phone, so shops that ask for deposits on large holiday orders still need to collect them at the counter or through their own system. Big custom requests, like that parish dinner or a 40-dozen fundraiser, should be flagged for the owner to call back rather than settled by the agent. Some older regulars will simply want to talk to a person, and the agent can transfer them when someone is free.

It is also only as good as what it is told. If the menu, the sold-out list or the pickup slots are not kept current, the agent will happily offer something the kitchen cannot make. During the busiest weeks someone needs to update those a couple of times a day.

A simple plan for this season

Pick the order cutoff date now and decide how many pickup slots each hour can handle on the 23rd and 24th. Update the menu with the holiday items and their prices, mark which ones are frozen only, and set a rule for orders above a certain size to go to the owner. Then let the phone take the routine orders while the kitchen keeps making pierogi.

If you are planning the wider holiday season, our post on why Filipino restaurants lose party-tray and holiday orders on the phone covers a similar pre-order pattern: https://www.ringfoods.com/blog/filipino-restaurant-party-tray-holiday-phone-orders-2026. For the everyday version of the same problem, see how restaurants handle takeout calls during peak hours: https://www.ringfoods.com/blog/how-restaurants-handle-takeout-delivery-calls-peak-hours. And if missed calls are the main issue, here is how restaurant phone answering works: https://www.ringfoods.com/restaurant-phone-answering

The bottom line

For pierogi shops and Eastern European restaurants, the holiday season is decided by how many orders get written down correctly before the cutoff. Most of those orders arrive by phone while everyone is busy making food. Answering every call, and getting each order read back and confirmed, is the simplest way to keep them. RingFoods offers a 30-day free trial if you want to try it before the December rush.