Poles apart
Forget Prague and its stag parties — Warsaw remains Eastern Europe’s undiscovered gem. MARKPORTER takes a drink on the quiet side
EARLY evening in Warsaw’s Old Town, and I am sitting in a bar, sipping a beer and thinking about British drunks. Call me a hypocrite, but I can’t help reflecting on how hard it now is to enjoy a tipple in the grand old cities of Eastern Europe without being jostled by a reeling British stagnighter.
But Warsaw is different. Enjoying the perfect medieval setting, I breathe a sigh of relief: not a stag-nighter to be seen, and I’ve already been in Poland for ten days.
Warsaw is still like Prague of a decade or so ago when it had recently emerged from the stodgy days of communism. The city is chocolate-box charming, inexpensive and ever- so- slightly rough around the edges. Perhaps most appealingly, it also still feels a little undiscovered.
I finish my second beer and pay up, hand over a fistful of zloty — less than £ 2 — and stroll off through Market Square, a cosy collection of restaurants and terrace bars around a statue of a sword-wielding mermaid. Warsaw is a long way from the sea, but this exotic and belligerent mermaid, known as Syrena, takes pride of place on the city’s coat of arms.
I head down to the city walls, where a narrow bridge spans the dry moat and connects the Old Town with the new city beyond. The delightful half-mile trek along Brewery Street (Piwna) and then down Freta, the longest street in New Town, could easily have become a paradise for barmy weekenders.
Instead, dotted between the bars, snug, vibrant restaurants offer the rich, traditional fare that best staves off the chilly Warsaw winters.
Until now, Warsaw has been relatively awkward to get to — and so the stag parties have stayed away. But with budget airlines opening up new routes, the hush won’t last long. Sample it while you can.
MY HOTEL, the Frenchowned Regina, once housed the U. S. embassy and is one of the newest and best in Warsaw. Absurdly cheap for its class, you can stay here for about £70 a night for a standard double room. It resembles a medieval castle — albeit a five- star one, with broadband thrown in — and the arched, windowless corridors are lit by large wooden torches.
Another great place to stay is the Residence Diana in Chmielna St, just a short walk south of the palaces and parks of Solidarity Avenue. These stylish apartments might have fallen off the pages of an interior design magazine, though the prices wouldn’t look out of place in a basic British B&B.
Even cheaper, but still perfectly comfortable, was the nearby Hotel Dipservice. Mention Polish food in the UK and you are unlikely to generate more than a shrug; for years, Poland was a land of empty supermarkets, stodge and cabbage. But Warsaw’s restau- rants now offer considerably more than that.
Fukier, in Market Square, is a 15th- century merchant’s house with vaulted ceilings and chandeliers, a charming hotch-potch of rooms smelling of flowers, herbs, candles and new money.
This is where business folk from Central and Eastern Europe meet their Western counterparts. You might not think it, but the pickled pig’s trotters in aspic washed down with vodka are sensational: huge portions, deliciously put together.
Other restaurants in Warsaw worth picking out include the upmarket Japanese restaurant, Tomo, and the wonderful Polska Rozana, on the edge of Lazienki Park, where traditional Polish and French specialities are spectacularly fused.
The Folk Gospoda offers live music and beer- fuelled shenanigans, while the Grand Kredens, on Jerozolmskie Street, scoops the accolades for some of the city’s best Polish fodder.
BEST OF all, however, was the Regina’s small rotisserie restaurant. The fillet of turbot with bison grass and curried mussel stew, followed by a Nantaise duck with cranberry and ginger, were beyond anything I had dared to hope for.
If Warsaw still conjures up negative images of Stalinist monoliths, concrete monstrosities and piles of rubble, we have only history to blame. During World War II, the city was almost entirely razed to the ground by the Germans, before being further trammelled by the Russians.
But the Poles are made of stern stuff and after the war much of the city was painstakingly recreated. Brick by brick, the beautiful 13th- century Old Town was restored to its former glory, using Canaletto’s faithful 18th- century depictions as a blueprint. The communist authorities, unable to shake the faith and character of this devoutly Catholic people, finally caved in and pumped millions into the reconstruction of the Royal Castle. The end result represents the jewel in the crown of the restoration work, and is well worth a visit.
After dinner at Fukier, I walked through the Old Town, past the Castle and down into the newer, commercial sector, heading for the nightclubs. My circuitous route took me past the awesome statue to the heroes of the Warsaw Uprising — those who rose and fought the Nazis in 1944, before being mercilessly slaughtered.
It also took me past the Bristol Hotel, which survived the destruction of the war simply because it was the Germans’ war-time headquarters. The grand facade that must have first appealed to the SS and Wehrmacht officers remains, still peppered with bullet holes, the handiwork of Polish snipers.
Central Warsaw is littered with fine churches, nearly all restored from rubble, and palaces owned by Poland’s once mighty aristocracy. But it is the optimistically named Nowy Swiat ( New World Street) — Warsaw’s answer to the Champs- Elysees — that attracts many of the city’s tourists. This is where many of the fashion and jewellery boutiques are located and tiny cafes — here to refresh beleaguered shoppers — fill the gaps between stores.
I turned off the Nowy Swiat and into Foksal Street, site of Foksal 19. Once the headquarters of the Union of Rowers, it is now one of Warsaw’s smartest nightclubs. Much has changed since the days of the watermen of the Vistula: there’s a 20- yard- long, internally lit bar of Brazilian marble; there’s red snapper cooked in banana leaves with mango and tomato salsa on the menu; there are Armani- suited — mostly Russian — free-spending scions of capitalism vying with each other to buy the biggest round, and lots of Polish celebs.
UPSTAIRS, the dance floor was booming and the bar staff were going flat out mixing cocktails. They were good — my new best friend Dominika insisted that I try four of them, so my recollections of the Cinnamon club later are somewhat hazy.
The best and most up- to- date information on cafés, pubs and clubs is called Warsaw In Your Pocket ( inyourpocket. com), an excellent monthly magazine updated by a savvy young writing team. But watch out — there are no licensing laws here, so places tend to close when the last guest leaves. You could easily lead yourself astray.
The following morning, my head felt as if it had been clubbed by Syrena and so before leaving on the Sunday I capped my trip by listening to a Chopin recital in Lazienki Park. Every Sunday during the tourism season there are two such concerts next to the Chopin memorial in this delightful and enormous park. A far cry, indeed, from the baying mobs in Prague’s Wenceslas Square. Strike before they do.
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