What culinary tradition is and what it does is still up for grabs. In the post-Covid relaunch, three restaurateurs in northern Poland offer different takes on how to connect their current customers to the past.
Fieldwork in Poland continues to be stimulating. Each time I visit, I get to dive a little deeper into a culinary culture that always seems to hold surprises in store. Nothing is as simple as it may appear at first glance. After one year and a half of Covid emergency, the restaurant industry is bouncing back. Some restaurants – especially the most expensive ones – have closed, but many have survived, at times shifting their focus and reinventing themselves. Some chefs have been exploring new directions, collaborating with the food industry in ways that in the long term may have a positive impact on what Poles can find in supermarkets and convenience stores. Those stories beg for further exploration.
As in other corners of the world, the pandemic has forced the food sector to rethink its priorities, its goals, and its conventions. As more consumers turned to ordering in and take away or cooked at home, the difference between what just feeds and what comforts has become more central. According to radio host Paweł Loroch, pizza, kebabs, and burgers may have gained terrain in terms of sales; however, his listeners have become interested in ingredients and techniques of familiar dishes, reflecting on quality while digging into their family repertoires. However, what tradition is and what it does is still up for grabs.
During my fieldwork in Northern Poland, I visited three restaurants that somehow represent different – but all legitimate – approaches to culinary tradition. All located in different areas of what used to be historical Pomerania, which for centuries was part of the German cultural sphere, they do not exhaust the rich and varied landscape of Polish gastronomy, but provide interesting examples of where conversations and practices are going.
Restauracja Ostromecko
Restauracja Ostromecko would come across as an unassuming roadside eatery, right outside the large industrial city of Bydgoszcz and close to two gorgeous historical palaces and a well-known mineral water spring. The building used to belong to a local socialist organization, and when its current owner Waldemar Klorek bought it and turned it into a restaurant, he had to embark on extensive repair. Its décor is all inspired to the past of Bydgoszcz, with oversized fin-de-siecle sepia photographs and beautiful early nineteen century bourgeois home furniture. Klorek has focused the menu on goose, a local specialty that has recently acquired more countrywide visibility in connection with the St. Martin November 11 celebration, a date which is also National Independence Day. Moreover, Poland is one of the largest producers of goose in the world, so it makes economic sense to highlight the culinary tradition connected with the fowl.
Goose specialties at Restauracja Ostromecko
Smoked goose breast, goose roulade, ground goose fat with onion and herbs, goose pierogi are presented matter of fact, without embellishments or aestheticized plating: just the way people would serve them at home. The connection with the community is also present in the choice of purveyors. Klorek knows them personally: they are more or less local, and many follow organic regulations. However, the low prices at the restaurant make many city dwellers suspicious, as they are used to much higher bills in establishments that advertise organic food.
Gospoda Mały Holender
40 kilometers east of the lovely coastal city of Danzig, the restaurant Gospoda Mały Holender has engaged with tradition on different terms. While Restauracja Ostromecko builds on recipes that are still actively prepared and transmitted in the region, Gospoda Mały Holender explores instead a tradition that at times needs to be rebuilt from scratch, as the community from which it originally derives does not exist any longer, at times is reconstructed putting together sparse surviving elements. The area of Żuławy, where the restaurant is located, was completely repopulated after World War II, when the original dwellers of German descent were replaced by ethnic Poles coming from the eastern territories that had been assigned to Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, by Ukrainians, and by inhabitants of the nearby Kaszuby and Kociewie areas. That historical demographic reshuffling, followed by forty years of socialist regime, erased the local customs almost completely.
Crafish Soup at Gospoda Mały Holender
Emblematically, the eighteenth century Mennonite wooden farm which hosts the restaurant, was transported to the present location after owner Marek Opitz bought it elsewhere. Opitz at first used the structure to make the material culture from the local past more tangible. Among other activities, he organized cheese making workshops, leveraging fragments of a tradition that still survived in the area. Overtime, however, he became interested in the culinary culture of the place, and his restaurant has been recreating products and dishes that had basically been erased. His mission is now continued by his son Jacek, a professional chef, who offers a streamlined but well curated menu in which local specialties such as the crawfish soup and the babka ziemniaczana (a baked potato pie) are highlighted, together with some adaptations and new creations. In this case, the engagement with tradition is ethnographic, almost archaeological, but the success of the experiment – also from a commercial point of view – suggests there may be followers.
Just a few kilometers away, in the charming coastal resort town of Sopot, celebrity chef Artur Moroz has been working in his restaurant Bulaj since 2004. Previously a fried fish dive of questionable fame, the restaurant has become one of the most interesting establishments in the so-called Tricity (Trojmiasto) of Danzig, Sopot, and Gdynia. Artur Moroz, who has a background in food science and does not disdain smart collaborations with the food industry, is one of the ambassadors of Polish cuisine abroad, sent by the local and the national government to represent the country in international exhibitions or to cook for diplomatic events. Unlike other chefs, he is proud of Polish cuisine and he is used to present it in its most demonstrative and didactic form around the world. His knowledge and experience makes him secure enough in his skills and creativity that in his own restaurant tradition is embraced and celebrated but also expanded, stretched, and experimented on.
Chef Artur Moroz discusses his menu
Chef Moroz laments the fact that many young chefs who are striving to elevate Polish cuisine “have started running before learning how to walk.” For his pierogi, both classic and creative, he is inspired by his grandmother’s dough texture and thickness, but he achieves that same mouthfeel through exhaustive research on flour and milling technology. On the menu, a traditional but perfectly executed version of żurek (sour rye soup) is featured next to a seafood soup where lemongrass and lime brighten the flavors; a classic venison pâté can be served side by side to a stunning beef tartare with seaweed and horseradish sauce. Like in other countries with very strong historical traditions and a well-developed restaurant culture, such as France, Italy, Japan, or Mexico, creative chefs experience the constant tension between the embrace and the respect for the past on the one hand, and their desire for innovation and experimentation on the other. After all, if tradition is to be kept alive, it cannot be treated as a fragile, untouchable museum piece…