With recent Mexican and Chinese immigration you now do get restaurants that are a taste of home, even in the northeast. Most of these are newer restaurants, with many patrons speaking Spanish or a Chinese language.
Eastern European food, however, is more challenging regarding authenticity once you get past the delicious dumplings. Not too many people want to go out of their way for boiled meats and cabbage, or fatty vinegary stuff in aspic. Egg salad on a hot day at the Latvian church picnic. Brrrr. I expect these cuisines to evolve the way food in the UK has, developing a new native cuisine.
Poles have some pretty delicious meals outside of pierogis. There's barscht (cabbage soup), zurek (a kind of sourdough soup), golabki (meat-stuffed cabbage leaves). Great pretzels too.
I've never had a Barszcz made with cabbage as a base. I'm not saying you're wrong - I'm not Polish. But my wife is, so we eat a lot of Polish food and visit Poland at least once a year. It's a biog country though, so it could be a regional variation.
My tips are: barszcz czerwony z pierogi (both red made from beetroot with a good pierogi), barszcz biały (white borsht - basically like żurek, but made with wheat and served with with meat and egg), żurek (a fermented rye soup), bigos (a stew made with cabbage, sour cabbage, lots of meat and sausage and other ingredients), gołąbki (as you said - cabbage leaf wrapping meat and rice filling, served with a tomato sauce), kopytka (a little like gnocchi), łazanki (like a polish lasagne, but with sour cabbage), or just something simple like kiełbasa z cebulą (sausage with onion fried.)
So much great food. This is only scratching the surface.
Few realize the breadth of dishes, and there are regional differences and food originating in different historical social classes. I haven't found any good places in the US (though I'm sure a few exist). Perhaps you'll experience some of them if visiting a Polish family. Christmas eve might be a good start where there are traditionally twelve courses. Also, soup is one of the specialties of Polish cuisine.
Polish barszcz is not traditionally made with cabbage - it's at heart a beet soup. Some variants of the soup made in Ukraine or Russia may contain chopped vegetables and sour cream, but in Poland warm barszcz is a consommé-style soup. There is also a cold variant served in the summer called chłodnik (a literal translation of which would be something like "cooler") which has sour cream in it.
Cabbage soup is called kapuśniak (from "kapusta" which is cabbage). Żurek is a fermented rye soup often called "white borscht" on North American restaurant menus. Another Polish soup worth trying if you find it on the menu and like sour flavors is zupa ogórkowa, which is a dill pickle soup.
P.s. many people from places like Poland consider themselves Central European. Some even Western European. I think this is about how they feel about being aligned with Russia, but also where their affinities lay
The EE/CE/WE labels have their uses, but I find that the way the EE label is used is more of an indicator of Western ignorance than anything else, kind of like the term "Dark Ages". In the Western mind, EE might as well be a country. England, France, Germany, Italy...Eastern Europe! It reinforces the Cold War era stereotypes that are still around, that it's just this huge, culturally homogeneous mass where everyone speaks some riff on Russian.
I'm not sure why Eastern Europe shouldn't be a valid term for talking about the countries in the east of Europe, though? After all, your own comment seems to refer to Western Europe as a group, as well.
It seems to me indisputably true that there are large groups of related countries in Europe, and as a French citizen I do not have any problem with being grouped with Western Europe. Sometimes Southern Europe even, or Latin. "Eastern Europe" doesn't seem less relevant for the countries that are east of Western Europe.
I have travelled a bit around Europe, and I certainly do feel more "at home" once I am back to somewhere west of the German/Polish border, anyway. I'd expect it to be the same (reversed, of course) for those who come from Eastern Europe.
> Egg salad on a hot day at the Latvian church picnic. Brrrr. I expect these cuisines to evolve the way food in the UK has, developing a new native cuisine.
Do you mean, adapt to fit the preferences of the native palete? No thanks, I would prefer that Lido just get forklifted into some country than to be offered a potato pancake not slathered in sour cream and horseradish…
Eastern European food, however, is more challenging regarding authenticity once you get past the delicious dumplings. Not too many people want to go out of their way for boiled meats and cabbage, or fatty vinegary stuff in aspic. Egg salad on a hot day at the Latvian church picnic. Brrrr. I expect these cuisines to evolve the way food in the UK has, developing a new native cuisine.