When I told friends I was going to Warsaw for a culinary event, they all responded with the same surprise. Mexico City would make sense. Or Tokyo. But this time it was, You’re going to Poland to eat?
I admit I was skeptical too. Granted, maybe I hadn’t done as much research as might have been ideal. But I'd been hearing rave reviews of the city, and, embracing the current “eastern Europe is the new western Europe” mind-set, I wanted to see a capital with a more complicated history than that of my own. I'd assumed potatoes, cabbage and sad post-communist pierogi might just be part of the deal—and that the bland flavor palette on the plate would match the look and mood of the city.
I was wrong.
This city of 2 million people appears for the most part as cosmopolitan as any capital to its west, with wide, tidy boulevards and bustling restaurants serving all sorts of cuisine. Public benches play music at the push of a button, paying homage to favorite son Frédéric Chopin. As a university town, the city is alive with youthful energy. The banks of the Vistula River are newly revitalized, the university library is a gorgeous green space, and the massive Lazienki Park is as beautifully manicured as ever, even though in recent years, the ban on jogging was lifted (it had been deemed unseemly to sweat in proximity to the royals.)
And the old city was rebuilt so precisely that it appears to have been unscathed by the war and has been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Its colorful buildings appear to be intact in their historic glory (if full of souvenir shops and restaurants that local foodies won't bother with). It’s a fine place to get lost for a few hours, and far less crowded than Krakow, let alone Prague.
If the city is unexpectedly colorful and green, that goes double for the food. While every meal served to journalists during the recent Lexus Hybrid Cuisine gourmet event did include steak tartare, and often foie gras, there was also a remarkable array of fresh-from-the-garden flavors. (I was among the hosted journalists.) A light lunch at Brasserie Warszawska was a parade of green: sorrel soup, cucumber with roasted cauliflower in buttermilk, butter lettuce salad over cold-smoked trout, asparagus with a perfectly poached egg, and roasted artichokes with endive. Even the pan-fried turbot came with a vibrant parsley sauce. It wasn’t meant to be avant-garde, just really good, made by a chef who says he hates short cuts.
This is my idea of a perfect lunch: vegetable-forward dishes in a sophisticated atmosphere with impeccable service from one of the city’s most respected restaurant groups. For those whose devotion to plants goes even deeper, the city has a robust vegan scene, with dozens of meat-free restaurants, not to mention the Forteca farmer’s market, in a converted brick fortress, which continues the tradition of private farms from before the revolution. A tour guide credited the vegan trend to Warsaw’s trajectory toward being “the new Berlin.”
Of course, meat still abounds. Dinner at Stary Dom—which has a beautifully atmospheric old-world dining room, complete with teams of waiters pushing around trolleys and serving things tableside, that belies its having been around only a few years—began with a procession of smoked venison saddle, wild boar and pheasant patés, pork and venison sausages, and jellied pig’s trotters, all before the steak tartare. Another night, a collaborative dinner hosted by several of Warsaw’s top chefs at chef Robert Trzópek’s Bez Gwiazdek (“No Stars”) included foie gras (after the tartare) with mead and black “czernina” duck blood soup, which a local food blogger told me is known colloquially as rejection soup, as the a serving of the black broth was apparently a sort of historical blow-off.
That kind of variety—but with a constant commitment to quality ingredients and alternately straightforward and inventive cooking techniques (many of these borrowed from the Scandinavians)—is the hallmark of Warsaw’s culinary scene now. The contrasts can give you whiplash. The century-old Hotel Bristol is launching a rooftop Perrier-Jouet Champagne bar, while on the streets below, the traditional Communist-era milk bars still thrive (some ironically), serving their cabbage pierogi and zurek (sour rye) soup. The elegant room at chef Jacek Grochowina’s excellent Nolita is in line with international fine-dining trends, while the outdoor courtyard at the lovely Ale Wino wine bar is as casual as the cooking—crostini with duck rillettes, celeriac ravioli with brown butter, and tarte tatin with foie gras (again)—is refined.
Of course, while Poland is now producing some highly drinkable wines—its first international wine fair is coming up this year—wine is not exactly the first beverage that comes to mind here. That, of course, is vodka, which can be sampled as flights or sipped with small plates at the intriguing Muzeum Wodki, which has nearly 10,000 exhibits dedicated to the production of vodka in Poland (it’s worth a visit to see the archival labels alone). The tasting room in the Vodka Atelier and the dining room in the Elixir restaurant are pretty, and the food is delicious.
Perhaps it was a few rounds in there, or in one of the city’s other cocktail bars, that led to the somewhat eccentric idea of Lexus Hybrid Cuisine, the event that drew me to Warsaw. It’s part of the company’s bid to be a lifestyle brand rather than just an automaker; it already has members’ clubs/cowork spaces in Tokyo and Dubai with an emphasis on good food. For this event, they invited seven top chefs from around the world with 10 Michelin stars between them—including Zaiyu Hasegawa of Den in Tokyo, Søren Selin of AOC in Copenhagen and Fredrik Berselius of Aska in New York—to cook a gala dinner using Polish ingredients, offer a tastings evening, and participate in panel discussions about the direction of world gastronomy. They also enjoyed meals made by their Polish counterparts and cross-pollenated culinary ideas; hence the “hybrid.”
Lexus hopes to make this the first of many events around Europe. And as for why the first edition was here, well, it was the Warsaw office that hatched the idea. Clearly, they know a good thing when they’re eating it.
