Street food at trendy night markets in large Polish cities reflects the desire to be worldly by eating the world. The line between a party and a meal is blurred. The food is integrated in a sense of fun and conviviality that marks the reclamation of public spaces and a new sensuality, combining eating, drinking, hanging out, and sometimes dancing. However, it matter that there is varied, exciting, international food.
It’s raining in Warsaw, but the weather is not stopping locals to enjoy a nice evening out. Lunapark, a new night market located on the western bank of the Vistula river, seems like a good place for a Saturday evening. The theme is an old-school, imagined Coney Island-like amusement park: the tent where the DJ spins music looks like a circus tent, with the entrance in the shape of the mouth a huge loopy cat. Other games are available, but people don’t go there for that. Food is the main attraction. A long line of booths selling of kinds of small and large bites unfurls underneath the highway, providing protection from the rain. Metal tables and oils drums painted in bright colors provide a festive mood, enhanced by the colored neon lights above. The spirit of using upcycled material in a postindustrial setting reminds of what can be defined as Global Brooklyn. People can sit, eat their food, and chat. Among the food stalls, a few bars make sure that drinks are available.
Lunapark night market, Warsaw
All sorts of cosmopolitan snacks are available, from tacos to Vietnamese rolls, Middle Eastern Mezze, and brick-oven pizza. The booths are managed by locals, who also prepare the food. These do not come across as small enterprises run by immigrants as an entryway into the Polish economy. As a matter of fact, Poland still has a relatively low number of immigrants, despite the moral panic partly spread by the current government, with the exceptions of the recent wave of Ukrainians (around 2 millions) and the Vietnamese that had settled during the last decades of the socialist regimes as the result of exchanges among the countries belonging to the Warsaw Pact.
The only booth that offers Polish food – kiełbasa – is Baron family, the most recent brainchild of chef Aleksander Baron, one of the most innovative figures in contemporary Polish fine dining. After leaving the restaurant Zoni, where he experimented with meat aging (also thanks to the injections of special mycelia) and researched regional specialties and historical recipes, Baron now is thinking about going back to working on fermented foods, which put him on the map a few years ago. In the meantime, he has developed a new sausage project together with his friend and pork expert Jacek Nowicki from Ostrzeszów. He likes to call his booth at Lunapark Gastronomiczny Obiekt Tymczasowy (temporary gastronomic object).
Baron Family kiełbasa at Lunapark, Warsaw
The Lunapark is not the only night market in Warsaw. We started exploring such places last summer. The first we visited was Nocny (“nocturnal,” in Polish), which belongs to the same owner and reflects the same food concept as in Lunapark. Nocny takes place in an abandoned railway platform covered by a corrugated metal roof supported by cement beams, the same as in many stations around Poland. On one side of its length, vendors offer all kinds of exotic foods, from oysters to tapas, from Georgian chinkali to Chinese steamed buns. In contemporary Warsaw, such variety reflects the excitement with with culinary tourism on the part of increasingly well-traveled urban population, while not necessarily expressing any form of liberal multiculturalism.
Just like at Lunapark, the offerings fall under what can be described as street food, more assembled than produced in pop-up booths, food carts, and food trucks, where young middle-class entrepreneurs do not recoil from engaging with the manual labor of cooking for money, a decision that would have horrified their parents but is now totally acceptable from a social status point of view. Given the proliferation of celebrity chefs and formatted cooking shows like Top Chef, it even carries a certain allure. In fact, the cooks, belong to the same milieu as their customers, which seemingly vary from lower to upper middle class.
It is not necessarily great gourmet food: its quality is not always the best but it nonetheless reflects the desire to be worldly by eating the world. Eating food is not the primary goal, but these rugged locations are not nightclubs either. The line between a party and a meal is blurred. The food is integrated in a sense of fun and conviviality that marks the reclamation of public spaces and a new sensuality, combining eating, drinking, hanging out, and sometimes dancing. However, it matter that there is varied, exciting, international food.
The booths are quite basic and deliberately call up the industrial food truck aesthetics: a few burners and a counter to serve clients, with simple boards listing the items on sale. Metal and reclaimed wood are the materials of choice. Patrons can be seen checking out the scene, talking to friends, taking selfies, and in some cases photographing food, a practice that also the vendors embrace and promote through their Instagram feeds, as the handles on some of the signs and menus indicate. The visual appreciation of the place is both generated and sustained by interaction over social media; it is there to be photographed and it has become what it is also because it photographed so well. The very design and even the vibe of the place have clearly been influenced by images from other corners of the world circulated through extensive global networks of social media, but the excitement on part of the crowds of friends speaks to the dimension of digital communication that sustaining intensive local networks.
Street food stalls also occupy the left bank of the river Vistula, which for years had been nearly abandoned, separated from the rest of the city by a large highway. In Poznan, for instance, the weekend parties-cum-street food happen at Nocny Targ Towarzyski, which is hosted in an old train repair facility (in these postindustrial times, there seems to be something romantic about the ruins of railway infrastructure). These arrangements are temporary, in terms of makeshift, retrofitted structures, seasonality (they are active only during the warmest months of the year), and their legal status. At times, the structures have been condemned to give way to residential neighborhoods, often entangled in political tug-of-wars between local authorities, political parties, and social activists. These places are both harbingers of gentrification and a commentary on gentrification itself: between a beer and a taco, people are likely to have ironic conversations about the problem they know they are a part of.
Despite the low investment, these spaces are carefully designed. They use minimal means that are meant to draw attention away from themselves and to a particular experience, an urban, youthful conviviality. On the bank of the Vistula, a pizzeria with a brick oven has found its home inside an abandoned cargo container, another important element of the postindustrial design grammar together with the EUR-pallet; the building blocks of these environment are often repurposed detritus of global mobility) while bars are located on barges moored to the bank (a gesture towards labor and commercial transportation, which were not that important on the Vistula bank in Warsaw in recent times). These reclaimed post-industrial spaces and objects look cool but also speak of tectonic economic shifts: railroads and boats were repurposed as people moved on to cars, as the laboring worker is no longer a central figure in the hegemonic social imaginary of the region. The past has left readable – although fading – marks in the present; the socialist decades are still mourned as a time of cultural and gastronomic loss; the fast economic development of Poland points towards a future of comfort (who cares about civic liberties…), where the world makes itself available to be leisurely consumed at a street food booth.
Street food is a topic that deserves attention, providing a unique entryway into social and economic dynamics that touch of migration, urbanism, culture, and design. I have been participating in the international CityFood Research Group (some of the work on Polish night markets was presented during one the group meetings), and together with Mateusz Halawa we have developed workshops we taught at the Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan, where aspiring food designers were sent out in the city to familiarize themselves with ethnographic methods and then came up with project ideas addressing various aspects of street food. In one iteration, designers further developed their concepts with Catalan designer Martí Guixé. More about street food, culture, and design in this blog….
Mateusz Halawa contributed observation and analysis to this post.