The rustic little shop held out longer than many other Ukrainian outposts in the East Village. With its shelves of records, tapes, books, newspapers, dyed Easter eggs, the beeswax styluses used to give those eggs their symmetrical patterns, white smocks and blouses with red and black embroidery, and local honey, Surma Book & Music Company had operated on East Seventh Street since 1943. At other addresses, it went back to 1918.

Two summers ago, it closed, going the way of Ukrainian butcher shops selling wrinkled sticks of hunter’s sausage, Ukrainian restaurants offering starchy knobs of halusky, and Ukrainian bars where the customers were downing shots of vodka before that was cool, and kept going after it wasn’t.

The East Village is a less interesting place without Surma. But the chain-store monoculture that might have seemed inevitable as the Ukrainian community fell away hasn’t been the neighborhood’s fate. Not yet. New Chinese restaurants have sprung up in the area over the past few years faster than the old Eastern European business have died off. In January, one of them moved into Surma’s old address. It’s called Le Sia, and it’s thriving.

Walk in any weekend night between 6 and 9, and a small throng will be waiting for seats by the entrance, below the kayaks that are stowed up by the ceiling as if this were the garage of somebody’s summer house. During the week, Le Sia takes reservations, but that doesn’t ease the demand by much. On some nights, the crowd is almost exclusively Chinese people of college age or slightly older, many of them lured out of their nearby New York University dorm rooms for steaming pans of shellfish, especially Le Sia’s specialty, crayfish.