Nubo Cafe & Bakery opened this month at 420 Cleveland St. in downtown Clearwater, adding a full Ukrainian kitchen and coffee bar to the Cleveland Street corridor. The cafe is the project of Oleksandr Kozlenko and his wife Oksana, who relocated from Ukraine to the United States in 2024 — and who, per the operator's Instagram, run the kitchen entirely from scratch with no frozen product.
The menu is structured around the central dishes of Ukrainian home cooking. Borshch arrives with sour cream, cured pork fat, adjika, rye bread, and green onions. Varenyky — the filled dumplings central to the Ukrainian table — come in six fillings: potato, mushroom, cabbage, beef, cherry, and cottage cheese. The rest of the menu runs deruny (potato pancakes), syrnyky (cottage cheese fritters), cabbage rolls, pelmeni, and okroshka, the chilled kefir soup that appears on Ukrainian menus through the warmer months.
The coffee bar pours espresso, matcha, chai, and pistachio cream lattes alongside uzvar, the traditional Ukrainian drink steeped from dried fruit. The pairing of a full savory menu with a coffee program built for both Ukrainian regulars and espresso-bar browsers suggests the Kozlenkos are positioning Nubo as an all-day destination rather than a specialty dining stop.
The interior, per the operator's Instagram, is done in pink with chandeliers, decorative mirrors, and an open kitchen — a visual register closer to a Central European cafe than the utilitarian aesthetic common to Eastern European restaurants in the region. The combination of the scratch commitment, the breadth of the menu, and the designed room indicates a deliberate effort to reach a broad Clearwater audience, not only the Ukrainian diaspora community.
The Kozlenkos relocated from Ukraine in 2024, and Nubo appears to be their first U.S. venture based on available source material. No prior tenant at 420 Cleveland St. was named in the Instagram post. Downtown Clearwater's Cleveland Street corridor has drawn independent food-and-beverage operators in recent years, partly tracking the city's investment in the Coachman Park waterfront redevelopment nearby. How Nubo performs in this stretch — and whether the full Ukrainian menu finds a footing beyond curiosity traffic — will be worth watching as the block continues to fill in.
