One grows weary of duck in apples and smalec. When one longs for an alternative to kuchnia staropolska, we have found that Italian restaurants are where the classy cooking is in Poland these days. We’re not talking pizza here, but good, modern Mediterranean cooking. Italian restaurants tend to have the cool minimalist décor and the correct lighting, the best service and the most attractively presented dishes. (And the best-looking waiters). And of course I’m a sucker for a nice gooey pudding. Luckily Harold does not own a pinstriped suit, otherwise he’d be stuffing his cheeks with cotton wool and drawing odd looks from the comparatively low-key and well-dressed real mafia. Dressed as a gondolier, however, he blends in perfectly and keeps the diners and staff entertained with “Just One Cornetto” and bits of Gilbert & Sullivan. The wrong bits, but let’s not be churlish, he made an effort.
My all-time favourite Italian restaurant in Warsaw has to be Ristorante Balgera at Sandomierska 13 (Tel: 849 5674) (not to be confused with Café Balgera just round the corner from the Embassy, which is also quite pleasant but not in the same league). Now this is real class. A large room cleverly lit with concealed halogen spotlights, some carefully selected pieces of old furniture but not enough to cause a cluttered look. The dishes are light, fresh and attractive, with lots of fresh spinach, rocket and mozzarella, and the service very professional. Bacio at Wilcza 43 is cosier and more flowery, and always bustling with customers: their private room is ideal for a raucous girls’ night out. I am sure this has got your imagination going, but I’m afraid I’m sworn to secrecy as to what goes on at the coven AGM. I have already written about the elegant San Lorenzo at Jana Pawła II no.36, which has an interior straight out of a Visconti film.
The Hyatt Regency’s Venti Tre is rather expensive but a very elegant place to eat, with the top level of service one would expect. Capriccio at Koszykowa 54 (near the corner of Piękna and Poznańska) is a very posh place too. The décor is slightly fussier but tastefully designed in peachy tones cleverly matched with the waiters’ waistcoats. I was rather disappointed with the zabaglione – it was nothing more than meringue in cold custard. Corazzi at Corazziego 4 (Tel: 826 1890) is very unprepossessing from the outside but very cosy inside and the food is scrumptioso, as they say in Milan. Delicious pasta, soups and desserts, and sumptuous meat and fish courses, not to mention cocktails to make you sleep with the fishes and prices that even Harold can’t complain about.
Kraków too has its fair share of excellent Italian eateries. Padva in ul. Jagiełłowska (Tel: 012 292 0272), right opposite the old university building, is tucked away underground, in a cool white cellar adorned with murals of rustic Chiantishire. The food is far removed from the heaviness of bigos, golonka and Lithuanian potato dumplings. Come along now, you Polish chefs – since the advent of central heating, no-one needs THAT many carbohydrates. On a recent visit to Kraków Vi and I treated ourselves to a blow-out at Da Pietro (Tel: 012 422 3279), another great Italian restaurant in a 14th century cellar on the Rynek (no.17, next door to Wierzynek). . Vi Hornblower can eat more, more often, and faster, than anyone else I know. For starter we each sampled a different variety of carpaccio – Vi had fillet beef, I had the one with salmon – mine was delicious, and Vi said hers was too, although she scoffed it so fast I’d be surprised if it ever came into contact with her taste buds. I had sole florentine for main course, ordered in the safe knowledge that Harold was not around to serenade us with “O Sole Mio”. It was quite succulent. Vi inhaled her salmon lasagne in seconds and pronounced herself stuffed, which didn’t stop her polishing off the largest ice cream either of us had ever seen. My tiramisu was smaller, elegant and very, very wicked. With a nice bottle of Orvieto white, the bill was around 200 zlotys, which is molto reasonable.
Vi and I made our latest assault on Kraków while Harold was away being revolting with the peasants. Kraków certainly beats the Russian Market for virtually everything except CD’s and dodgy 10-zloty notes. All the little backstreets which lead into the main square are studded with divine little shops crammed with the most gorgeous coats, shoes, furs and jewellery. Vi, who is a sort of cross between Zelda Fitzgerald and Bet Lynch, found some divine leopardskin shoes, just like the ones Theresa May wore at the Tory Party conference. Vi had to go one further and bought matching underwear! I think it was out of solidarity with the World Wildlife Fund, although the thought of her in a leopardskin thong brings the other WWF (the World Wrestling Federation) to mind. She bought Desmond a pair of tight leather trousers – poor man! He’ll never stay awake long enough to get both legs in. I’m sure they’ll be much too small for him anyway, she told the assistant they were for someone with “snake hips”, for heaven’s sake! Snakebite, more like. After our blow-out at Da Pietro we waddled off down towards Kazimierz, which is where the action is in Kraków these days. The bars are so trendy that some of them don’t even have signs outside. Habana is, as you might expect, a Cuban-style bar at the end of Miodowa by the New Synagogue, where we happily sat for a couple of hours sampling cuba libres and mojitos. Harold would have enjoyed it there in his “Che” period, it had a huge poster of the esteemed Dr Guevara on the back of the toilet door and the soundtrack from Buena Vista Social Club was playing in the background. And of course no-one would have had the cheek to waft his cigar smoke away.
I have just finished reading Harold’s Christmas present, “The Great British Battleaxe” by Christine Hamilton. The Major and I have been compared on occasion with Mrs H and her hapless husband, but frankly I can’t see the resemblance – she’s so frightfully pushy. I see myself more in the mould of the Divine Margaret: emanating terror by the merest glint of those steely eyes. The stiletto between the ribs rather than the sledgehammer over the cranium. An offer nobody, especially Harold, can refuse.
Harold’s favourite barmaid at the Heineken pub on Puławska 111a (the one with the tattoo) has left, and he’s been looking downhearted ever since, his only opportunity to engage in some light-hearted banter with the opposite sex being his twice-nightly encounter with the ancient crone who sits knitting outside the loo. Imagine his delight, then, when a new barmaid appeared recently, one with a cleavage so vertiginous that it should only be approached with crampons on. Harold had a clear view down the piste, so to speak, from his place on the hatstand, and refused to move to the cosy corner table which had just become free, his gaze riveted to the bar and his mouth hanging open in a rictus grin. Unfortunately she did not come near the tables (or the hatstand) being purely for promotional purposes. Harold did not dare approach the bar, for fear of falling in, I presume.
We have recently had occasion to sample a few of the more with-it eating places in Warsaw, which we were surprised to find very busy both midweek and weekends. The Warsaw Tortilla Factory (Wilcza 46) on a Thursday night was absolutely heaving with “spotty yoof”, as Harold refers to the younger generation (the male element of course). The food was not quite to our high standards, consisting as it does of tasteless dry pancakes with a nondescript filling and chips, but we were invited by our young friend Scrumpy and his latest Polish girlfriend (of which there have been several since he arrived in Warsaw ten days ago). Scrumpy is over here on a work exchange – he has exchanged work for a life of leisure - and had had a good day banging on his bongos outside the metro at Centrum so offered to treat us to his idea of a slap up meal. One can’t expect young people to have a clue when it comes to food, raging hormones have far more sway than taste buds. Unfortunately, when it came to paying, the pocketful of change he dumped on the table was a mixture of Deutschmarks, French francs, Spanish pesetas, Italian lira, Dutch florins and a couple of tokens for the New York subway, so uncle Harold kindly stepped in with the plastic.
Our curiosity about the new fashion for “fusion” cooking led us to visit the ultra-trendy “Sense” at Nowy Swiat 19 (Tel: 826 6570) http://www.sensecafe.com/home.html. The tables are a little cramped but this obviously wasn’t going to deter the large crowd of Warsaw’s bright young things who packed the place out one Saturday night in early November. I must say these were the more stylish (i.e. rich) kind of youngsters – not a dreadlock in sight. The restaurant furniture is a strange combination of orange comfy chairs and carefully thought-out and expensively-made table-tops in zebra-striped wood veneer which managed to replicate Formica quite convincingly. The eating area sits in sharp contrast to the adjacent drinking area, where patrons sip their Red Bull at a futuristic comptoir of high-tech shattered glass under icy blue lighting. The music is a hypnotic blend of jazz and techno, and if you like it you can buy a CD at the reception area. I of course fitted in like a dream with all the supermodels in black polo necks, but Harold looked like a fish out of water until his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting and he noticed the large number of young leggy blondes, whereupon he started to cheer up.
The waiter brought us the menu, which I nearly sent back, thinking he’d given us a brochure for a sex shop by mistake. The various categories were listed in English as “Foreplay” (starters), “Wet” (soup), “Wild” (salads), “Hot” (spicy), and “Hardcore” (main meat and fish dishes). I turned to the desserts, expecting “Orgasm”, or at the very least “Oops, honestly that’s never happened before”, but they were incongruously entitled “Happy Endings”. Something of an anticlimax. The food is modern-oriental, and served on square plates. Very River Café Cookbook. My starter was composed of crispy duck slices served with hoisin sauce, noodles and a salad of cucumber and spring onions – a variation on my favourite crispy duck pancakes. Harold was tempted by the wonton soup (that should have been “wanton soup” in keeping with the nudge-wink tone of the menu) but in the end couldn’t resist ordering the “Pillows of Joy”, delicious prawn, crab and pork dim sum (steamed dumplings to you) - I could tell he was still thinking of that barmaid’s cleavage. The food was delicious and the portions rather nouvelle, although the duck starter would have been better served warm than stone cold. For main course I ordered “Wok ‘n Roll noodles with stir fry chicken” and Harold went for Surf & Turf, which consisted of slices of lamb served with scallops and pak choi. My chicken noodles were slightly spicy and excellent, although simple and nothing more than a bowl of noodles; Harold enjoyed the scallops, although lamb was an odd choice of “turf”.
We had a bottle of Merlot at a most reasonable 59 zlotys to wash it down. The service was good, and the staff are well trained and all speak excellent English. The bar has a vast selection of vodkas which are kept in a chilled cabinet, and Harold couldn’t resist a couple of Chopins to round off his meal. A visit to the loos was rather disorienting – from the ice-blue lighting on the grey concrete stairs to the frosted glass doors, they’re not designed to keep you hanging about. Our feeling was that “Sense” is trying just a little too hard to be different and trendy, and would do well to use a bit more sense with its flavour combinations. One or two of the dishes on the menu defied the imagination – wild boar in red wine and chocolate sauce, indeed! Whatever next. The cuisine struck us as more Confusion than Fusion, but it certainly made a change from duck with apples. The bill was a most reasonable 235 zlotys, including two G & T’s, a bottle of wine and two snifters. But next time I’ll make sure Harold wears his Paul Smith.
To round off the evening we walked up to Plac Trzech Krzyży (it’s always a good test of how drunk you are to see whether you can still say that) and stood outside the trio of bars Szpilka, Szpulka and Szparka trying to decide which one to favour for a last snort. Through the plate-glass windows we observed the throng of beautiful peroxide-blonde solarium-tanned stick insects (and that was just the barmen). Our dilemma was resolved deftly by the Phil Mitchell lookalike doorman, who said “Isn’t it time you old dears went home to bed? It’s ten o’clock.” “Come along, Harold,” I said, steering him towards a taxi. Sometimes one should just give in gracefully.
