Warsaw 2009: food!

Food in Poland is hearty and - at least I found it so - delicious, and by Norwegian standards very cheap. Even in the capital restaurant prices were very reasonable. Portions were very generous. :-) We picked restaurants mostly at random - although we tried to eat in places serving Polish cuisine whenever we could - and were happy with all of them.

Here's my mother checking out one of the great many restaurants in the Old Town ... but we ended up not going to this one, for some rather vague reason that I don't remember any more. :-) But the exterior was certainly pretty.

The menu posted outside the restaurant we did end up eating lunch at that first day. Reading it I felt quite sorry for poor Ed ... !! ;-)

Our meal. Very solid portions and absolutely delicious.

Hot chocolate in the almost deserted café tucked away in a corner upstairs in the Royal Castle. It was good, but not as good as the one you get at Hotel Bristol here in Oslo. ;-)

Magda Gessler is a famous Polish restaurateur, she has several restaurants around Warsaw. We read about her in our guide book and wanted to try one of these places. I know, so touristy!! But we had a good meal here ...

... and the interior was certainly very pretty and charming. :-)

At Arkadia mall we sat down for something to drink and a bit of food ... of course I had to take a picture of this sign on the table advertising a 'turtle latte' - neither of us ordered it, so I have no idea what it was, but it does sound slightly suspicous IMO. The guy in the background is a local man that we talked to over coffee, he was really nice. Told us about his trip to Norway. :-)

One night during our stay the weather was so bad that we decided not to go far for our dinner, and instead tried the Czech restaurant on the same block as our hotel. It was part of a chain that as you can see is inspired by Jaroslav Hašek's popular character, The Good Soldier Švejk. They had a really cool interior, I really liked it there.

And the portions were enormous ... !! :-D

Check out the decorative sausage. :-D Very tasty it was too.

On our last night there we picked a really fancy restaurant. It was decorated in a hunting lodge kind of style with lots of stuffed animals and so on. One of the things they had was a wild boar's head ... this was right by our table. Sorry about the blurry picture, but flash would have made it look totally crazy.

Anyway ... the boar's head inspired us in our choice of food; we chose the wild boar goulash that you can see listed in the menu here. I love how they have little symbols to denote the contents of the dishes. In this country you will often see that on restaurant menus to show which dishes are suitable for vegetarians ... ie, a little plant symbol or whatever will be on the menu next to whichever dishes are meat-free. But on this menu, well, they're using the symbology differently. :-D

Our soup! It was so cool how they served it. And no worries about it getting cold before we had finished. :-)

It was absolutely delicious, I can heartily recommend wild boar goulash if you're ever in Poland.

Here we are at our table ready to eat. Again, a blurry shot, but the best we could do without the flash which would have made it look totally different than what it was really like. That is so annoying. Oh well. :-)