Bar Bambino
Address: 19 Hoza Phone: 011-48-22-625-16-95
The look: I stopped for breakfast at Bar Bambino, a few minutes’ walk from the main Centralna junction for the city’s trams and buses. Bambino has been in business since the middle of the last century, and locals swear by it.
Its large space has been updated with Midcentury Modern design that would look at home in Palm Springs: clean right angles, wood-grain-pattern wallpaper accented with yellows and vines, and overhead lamps shaped like upside-down Dixie cups.
As I peeked through the pickup window into the kitchen, I could easily imagine myself in the same spot 30 years ago, watching the same cooks in the same matching frocks, aprons and white hairnets. The meal: Even at the breakfast hour, patrons were ordering generous plates of pirogi, but I stuck to something more breakfast-y yet different and slightly exotic. Flour mixed into the eggs for my omelet lent a golden brown surface and halfway-to-pancake texture; it was topped with grated cheese and creamed spinach. A cup of prodigiously hot coffee had a centimeter-thick sludge of grounds at the bottom. The restaurant also serves lunch and dinner. Fun thing to do nearby: It’s about a 25minute walk or a quick bus ride to Stare Miasto — the Old Town, the painstakingly rebuilt and highly photogenic historic center along the Vistula River.
Along the way is the Frederic Chopin Museum, in an attractively restored former mansion. The Polish-born composer is revered in his home country (Warsaw’s airport is named for him), although as a non-Chopinologist I found the museum hard to grasp, and many of the high-tech displays were out of order during my visit.