Marek Widomski grew up in Krakow in an era of rationing – clothes without colour, butchers’ shops displaying empty hooks, overnight queues for anything of value, towels available only for newlyweds with certificates. ‘You could always get vinegar,’ a Pole told me. ‘There were well-stocked shops selling only that.’ The possible splendours of food were the last things on Marek’s mind. ‘I knew about potatoes, sausages and tripe,’ he told me.
He migrated first to Hungary and then to Italy, where he found work in a hotel kitchen. ‘There I discovered many wonderful foods – basil, tomatoes, oysters, pasta, of course. I was surprised, fascinated.’ From there he went to Canada and the kitchen of the five star Le Méridien in Vancouver, where he worked with world-class chefs, encountered all the fusion and ethnic foods of the Pacific coast and travelled the world on hotel business learning its different cuisines. When he came back to Poland in 1997, the apparatchiks, the generals and the food coupons were gone. ‘Poland was opening to the world,’ he said. ‘I could see the possibilities.’ He directed the opening of new restaurants in Krakow, started Poland’s first gourmet consultancy and established a culinary institute to teach gourmet cooking to both professional chefs and amateurs, and to promote the resurrection of the native culinary tradition.
I spent two days in Krakow with Marek being shown his city and taken to some of his favourite restaurants. I had first seen it in 1995 and it struck me then, as it does now, as one of the most stunning and seductive cities, monumental epic grandeur mixing with a delicacy of taste, caustic humour with full-blown romanticism. This was the same city Marek returned to from Canada, just then re-emerging into greater Europe. Now much of the world is coming to it. Krakow has become one of Europe’s best-appointed, least expensive short-break destinations.
When the Berlin Wall came down, the styles and diversions of the West began to move through the gap – big cars, yoga centres, gossip magazines, golf, boutique hotels. Krakow now is entertaining, inviting, open all night and richly atmospheric, with a range of food from the Polish pizza known as zapiekanka sold by vendors in the Plac Nowy, through every ethnicity, including Polish, to the exquisitely refined, Michelin-recommended. There are places to stay from such dormitories as Good-bye Lenin to beautifully appointed, multi-starred hotels restored by hand in ancient palaces and a greater density of interesting bars, it appeared to me, than can be found even in Dublin. Among Krakow’s flow of cultural events and the vast number of historical monuments and buildings in this city that miraculously escaped war damage is one of only five paintings by Leonardo da Vinci (at Czartoryski Museum) on public display in the world. We walked the thronged streets around the Rynek Glowny (main square) and the old Jewish quarter, Kazimierz, where the city’s seventh annual Soup Festival was going on and where you can still see signs like Babelstein, which was once a bar, or Rubinstein, a hotel which was named after the Queen of Cosmetics, Helena Rubinstein, who was born next door. We stopped at the Café Camelot on Doubting Thomas corner, where candles, paintings and carved wooden dolls display the delicacy Poles have a particular talent for creating.
