Nothing is ever the same second time around, is it? After our triumphant visit to Krakow at the beginning of the year, we took our visitors with us this time - Sid Grimthorpe, Harold’s former NCO from somewhere north of Scarborough, and his wife Ivy. Lovely people, salt of the earth and all that, but I had great trouble deciphering a word they uttered. They spoke a guttural dialect vaguely resembling working-class Icelandic - it made Polish sound quite mellifluous by comparison.
We took them to the Kawiarnia Ratuszowa under the Rynek on the first evening, which was a good choice. It’s essentially a steak-and-chips place, but the food is always copious and good value for money, which is important where Sid and Ivy come from, and fresh, which is important to us. I think we all had steak, salad and chips in some form or other, and the bill was about 150 zlotys for four of us. Sid made approving noises in his native tongue, something along the lines of “Eee, arby reet hawa yer ganny son” (I’m sure all those from north of Watford will know what he meant!).
After dinner, Harold of course wanted to have a snifter at Panaceum and look up his old girlfriend Blondie, she of the long blonde tresses and quivering thighs. Indeed she was still there, but not as Harold remembered her. Gone was the shimmering mane of gold and the split to infinity skirt - she now sported a skinhead crop, nose ring, tattoo and Doc Marten boots. Harold smiled ingratiatingly in hopes that she would remember him and tell him her twin sister was in the back slicing lemons, but if she did remember him she certainly didn’t let on, and stomped sulkily back to the bar after slamming down our drinks. Harold was quite mortified, and convinced himself he must have inadvertantly jilted her last time, hence the embittered transformation. I made sympathetic noises, but had already spotted the sullen spiky-haired gel in a leather jacket and combat pants hanging around near the door. I hadn’t got the heart to tell Harold the truth, at his time of life it might have killed him.
The next evening, after a day tramping through the salt mines, we returned to the Elefant Pub which had so impressed Harold on our last visit - only to find it wasn’t called the Elefant Pub at all! It was in fact called simply Pub C.K. Browar, but the PUB sign over the door is adjacent to the sign over a department store called … Elefant. Oh well, it will always be the Elefant Pub to me. Sid, being a northern man, immediately took a shine to this very male drinking establishment and he and Harold had fun working their way through the Polish equivalent of a yard of ale - a 3-litre glass pipe with a tap at the bottom, full of cloudy beer (made on the premises - the pub is also a micro-brewery). Ivy and I had to almost drag them out bodily before they started on a second, as we’d reserved a table at Pod Aniolami, which we had so much enjoyed on our previous visit. Alas, we were faintly disappointed this time. Our first two choices of wine were not available, neither was the lamb main course. This is frankly inexcusable at the height of the tourist season. Harold ordered smalec to show Sid and Ivy some typical Polish cooking. Their reaction was not really enthusiastic, and the Polish speciality came off badly when compared with the scrapings off Ivy’s mother’s chip pan. Sid liked the red barszcz, but Ivy claimed the duck was tough (although Harold’s was delicious). My bigos was all right, but no more. Frankly, how exciting can bigos get? Having visitors from England, particularly ones as outspoken as the Grimthorpes, sometimes opens one’s eyes to faults one has a tendency to overlook as a resident in Poland. Such as the food. And the number of restaurants and cafes which charge you to use the loo, even when you’re a customer. Or the fact that shopkeepers NEVER have any change. We saw one girl open an empty till at the start of business one morning. For goodness sake, don’t they have banks here? It makes it very difficult trying to impress people, I do wish the locals would make more of an effort sometimes.
The next day we did our Jewish thing, and packed the Grimthorpes off to Auschwitz while we tramped around Podgórze for hours looking for the Emalia factory. When we eventually found it, of course it was nothing like it was in the film, and there was not even a plaque to commemorate Oskar Schindler. It was just an ordinary factory producing something or other. We dined in Kazimierz again, this time at the Klezmer Hois, which has a bigger dining room than Ariel, though still resembling your Aunt Myriam’s sitting room in Golder’s Green. The food was better than at Ariel, I thought - I tried chicken knedlach, or dumplings, which were delicious, and Harold’s trout was excellent. Sid had a huge vegetable omelette, and Ivy had chicken schnitzel , which she said was dry. I started to get the impression Ivy wasn’t over-keen on Abroad. There were two klezmer bands, the first young and rather soulful, the second older and more traditional Jewish wedding music. A large group of American ladies sitting behind us shouted at each other constantly throughout both performances, while we and the rest of the diners were trying to listen to the music. Harold finally thought up the most anti-American gesture he could make without mentioning the war, and lit a large cigar, blowing the smoke quite deliberately at the chattering matrons. Sadly even this did not shut them up.
Ivy wanted to spend the whole of the last day shopping in the Sukiennice, so we set up base camp at a terrace café on the square and occasionally relieved her of bags full of wooden carvings, Polish dolls, amber jewellery and embroidered tablecloths, freeing her arms up for more purchases. Sid sat nursing a Zywiec and muttering in his own language, something about “divvy gan yam weeya” which I think was a mild indication of concern about space in the suitcase.
On our last evening we tried a new place – U Szkota – a cellar restaurant and bar a shade upmarket after some of Krakow’s seedier student bars. The décor is olde-worlde and the Scottish theme extends to waiters in kilts and haggis on the menu – although we refrained from pointing out that the hunting scenes on the walls were most un-Scottish. Ivy and Sid, cautious after the exoticism of the Jewish restaurant, played it safe with sirloin steaks in various incarnations, but thankfully this time Ivy declared hers delicious. Harold went for roe deer (or “Bambi”, as he insensitively calls it) which was very good. I, unwisely (not like me at all) chose goose. I realized later, as I was sawing through the leather-like pieces of meat, that goose can never be fresh in a restaurant due to its size, and had obviously been cooked earlier, sliced and frozen. Let that be a lesson to me.
On our return to Warsaw, we took Sid and Ivy to Champions Bar at the Marriott for their farewell dinner in Poland, where we had burgers and pizza with chips. They thought it was reet smashing, like.
N.B. If you wish to try some of these restaurants yourself, the addresses can be found in “Krakow in your pocket”, a handy little guide available for 6 zl from any Krakow bookseller or tourist office.
