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The Old Krakow Restaurant and Art Café
385 West Portal Avenue
San Francisco, California 94127
+1.415.564.4848

The Old Krakow Restaurant and Art Café, located in West Portal, is a treasure. An intimate, authentic slice of Poland, this eatery offers inexpensive and high-quality fare. My dad loves to come here, eat his childhood favorites, and speak in the local patois. The following are my favorites from the regular menu.

Appetizer

• Red Borsht - a sweet clear broth unlike any of the horrid concoctions you've had the misfortune of tasting. This is the one to try even if you're damned sure you hate beets.
• Cream of Mushroom Soup - thick with mushrooms, creamy, and best eaten with the seeded bread brought to the table.
• Cucumber Salad with Sour Cream Dressing - just like I had during my last visit to Krakow and Warszawa.

Main Course

• Bigos (Hunter's Stew) - cabbage, meat, and sausage served with mashed potatoes.
• Pierogi - pasta pocket filled with either seasoned meat or sautéed cabbage and mushrooms.
• Bogracz - spiced beef stew seasoned with caraway seeds served over small potato dumplings.

Beverages

• Kawa po polsku - coffee served with the grounds still at the bottom of the glass.
• House coffee - tasty since the autumn of 1997.
• Black currant juice - another tasty staple of Poland. Sweet and refreshing.

Dessert

• Nalesnik z serem - a crêpe filled with sweetened white cheese, black currants, and fresh whipped creme.
• Mousse au chocolait - bittersweet chocolate with a hint of almonds and chunks of chocolate topped with whipped cream.

Also of note are the special menus served on Valentine's Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's Eve and Day.

Here's an article - © 1998 NewTimes, Inc. - from the 18 - 24 February 1998 edition of the San Francisco Weekly. It was so good that I wanted to archive it here for posterity. I can't believe they missed the mousse!

Magnetic Poles

Old Krakow Polish Restaurant & Art Cafe
385 West Portal (at Wawona), 564-4848. Open for dinner daily 5 to 10 p.m., for brunch on weekends from noon to 3 p.m. Reservations recommended. The restaurant is fully wheelchair accessible. Parking is easy unless the nearby Empire movie theater has a big hit. Muni via the 17 Parkmerced, 48 Quintara, and the K, L, and M metro lines.

By Naomi Wise

“This sauerkraut -- I can’t believe it,” I was saying. “Not only am I eating it, but I’m actually liking it!” TJ wore an “I told you so” smirk. “That’s because it’s not sour and it’s not ‘Kraut.’ Poles don’t pickle and boil their sauerkraut like Germans, they brine and sauté it. Not like anything you’ve tasted before, huh?”

Chef Feliks Janiszewski and Owner Marek Cichosz: A warm respite for the rainy season. (Photo by Pat Mazzera)

It was TJ’s turn to pick a restaurant. “I want you to learn about my Grandma’s cooking,” he said, “and this cold rainy weather is just right for it.” So we headed for Old Krakow, the city’s only Polish restaurant, open a little under four years. En route we gathered up Steve and Dawn, who live near the restaurant and have eaten there before. It proved a comfortable, very European room in West Portal, its walls hung with original paintings by several Polish artists in various modern styles and moods. The owners (who wait the tables in gracious fashion) are an attractive couple probably in their 30s; they brought their separate art collections when they emigrated from Krakow, before meeting each other here. A charmingly random assortment of big, antique-looking tables and carved wooden chairs are so widely spaced, we could actually hear each other’s conversation and barely a syllable of the neighbors’. A big green stuffed dragon grinned from a table in a rear alcove: Krakow’s name mythically derives from local hero, Krak, who founded the city around 700 A.D. by slaying a dragon that lived in a cave under the town’s hilltop castle. Dragon-free Krakow flourished to become the political and cultural capital of medieval Poland.

Steve and Dawn are vegetarians (of the lacto-ovo-pisceo- persuasion), which made ordering just a bit problematic, given that the Polish word for “vegetables” (wloszczyzna -- hey, easy for you to say!) literally means “Italian things.” Apparently, aside from cabbage and beets, the Poles didn’t eat greenery until a 16th-century Italian princess married the Polish king and brought her homeland’s fare into fashion. Old Krakow, though, serves several vegetarian dishes, asterisking them on the menu. No Italian influence was needed to inspire the Polish passion for forest fungi, so we began with a big bowl of Dawn’s favorite Old Krakow dish, cream of mushroom soup ($3.50/$6). Banish the Campbell’s version from your mind: This was one addictive big-flavored bowlful. Domestic and nameless wild mushrooms, some minced fine and others coarsely chopped, lent their heaven-in-earthiness to a deep, velvety broth smoothed with a luxuriance of sour cream.

The omnivore/reviewer faction had to order appetizer plates of house-made kielbasa ($5) and sauerkraut ($3), to get pristine tastes of elements that would play vital parts in other dishes. The sauerkraut was a revelation: In superfine shreds, it was pungent without being sour, and bore a subtle aroma of the sauté medium -- goose fat. (No wonder I loved it!) TJ, the Quiet Man, was finally in his element, explaining ancestral cooking traditions.

“My grandmother, who was well into her 90s when she died in 1983, came from Poland at age 15 as a mail-order bride,” he related. “Her parents had more or less sold her to my grandfather, a much older German homesteader on a large farm in a Polish-German community in Minnesota. She was none too happy about it, but she was stuck with him. Grandma would never make the sour cabbage that Grandpa wanted, German sauerkraut. Her version was sweet like this; she even included a little sugar.

“She taught all us kids to make it,” TJ continued. “When I had my ranch, we made sauerkraut every fall and canned it. You core and shred 10 heads of cabbage, and throw them into a straight-sided tub, like a 5-gallon paint can. You cover the cabbage with a salt brine, and drape the top with enough cheesecloth to hang well down over the sides. Then you cover the cheesecloth with a flat plate that just fits inside the crock, and weight that down with a brick -- it keeps the cabbage submerged in the liquid; otherwise a lot will float on top and the batch will spoil instead of curing.

“You put the crock in the cellar or on a cold back porch -- someplace you won’t smell it! -- and twice a day, every 12 hours, you skim the stinky scum from the top of the cabbage. The cheesecloth absorbs the scum; you can just lift it and rinse it out instead of standing there skimming.

“After five days, the kids used to dip in and steal hunks of it, half-fermented, but if you wait 10 days, you get sweet Polish sauerkraut -- not the German kind you buy in the markets, which gets additional processing with vinegar.”

The subtly seasoned house-made kielbasa tasted cured but not smoked, its meat coarser-ground than the emulsified commercial version (Hillshire Farms, for example). “Grandma used to make her own kielbasa, too,” TJ said, “using a hand meat-grinder attached to a corner of the table, with the fine grinding plate in it. It was her kids’ job to crank the grinder, and then she’d season the pork. Her neighbors had pig intestines to use as sausage skins, so she’d turn the mixture over to them, and they’d make it into links for her, keeping some sausage for themselves in exchange. Another neighbor would make blood sausages for the whole community when the hogs were slaughtered in the fall. Grandma refused to make those because she couldn’t stand the smell.”

Three of us also loved the crisp cucumber salad ($4) with sour cream, dill, and fresh scallion. TJ, however, complained that his grandmother’s version was better. “My grandparents were part of a dairy farm co-op,” he explained. “You ever see those big stainless-steel milk cans? A yellowish cream about as thick as crème fraîche would rise to the top of them, and it was my grandmother’s job to skim that off. People wanted milk or butter, but nobody wanted that top layer -- that crème de la crème -- so if you left it on, it would bring down the price of your milk. That’s what Grandma used in her cucumber salad, instead of sour cream. This is watery in comparison.” But the rest of us liked it plenty.

On a return visit, TJ and I tried the red borscht ($3/$5), a light, sweet-sour beet broth topped with crisp fresh parsley, with soothing tortellinilike dumplings of thick pasta filled with mildly spiced ground meat. We sopped up the last drops with wheaty peasant bread from the multiflavored bread basket. The soup du jour that night was a warming, hearty purée of white beans with chopped potatoes and carrots and minced bacon floating in the thick broth. Since we’d returned without vegetarians to horrify, we lived dangerously and essayed beef tartare ($8.50), a culinary version of spectacularly unsafe sex. In traditional fashion, a delicious mound of salty, peppery top-quality raw minced beef was capped with a raw egg, accompanied by a ramekin of soy sauce and surrounding garnishes of chopped onions, marinated mushrooms, and chopped pickles. You mix it up as you like. We loved it to death and lived to tell the tale.

Poland’s best-known dish is bigos, “hunter’s stew.” There’s no single recipe for it, TJ remarked on our visit with Dawn and Steve: It’s made during hunting season from whatever meat you’ve got, but it usually includes sausage. “The prize catch is the elusive short-horned kielbasa,” I said. “Right,” said TJ, “you have to kill ’em with a slingshot so you don’t bruise them.” When TJ’s father was growing up during the Depression, bigos was like the “stone soup” of folklore -- it was a community feast, and every family put something in. At the end of the evening, each family got to take home a hunk of raw game-meat, usually venison. The restaurant’s version ($10), big enough to serve three, had small chunks of beef, pork, and kielbasa mixed into a great delicious mess o’ wloszczyzna, including light and dark cabbage, onions, mushrooms, and sauerkraut in a tomato-touched sauce. I found it more exotic than the Spanish, Moroccan, and Thai dishes I’d eaten during the past several weeks; it reminded me of a chileless version of Nigerian beef-and-greens stew. Alongside was a hillock of dense dairy-free mashed potatoes smoothed with their own cooking water.

TJ ordered stuffed cabbage rolls in tomato sauce ($12; for another buck you can get mushroom sauce), which also came with the vegan mashed potatoes. The pair of rolls, as overstuffed as Victorian armchairs, were each the size of a Solidarity workman’s fist. Inside dark green leaves (perhaps savoy), the filling of ground beef and fluffy rice had an earthy nip of caraway seed, and the marinaralike tomato sauce was gently sparked with black pepper and perhaps a touch of clove. “It’s not like my Nonna’s,” said Dawn (my ex-cousin-in-law-once-removed) as she tasted a splash of the sauce. “Your Nonna’s version was the same one your Aunt Rosa taught me how to cook,” I said. “That’s the Russian-Jewish version, sweet-sour, tangy, with a lot of cloves. Polish cooking is obviously really different from both Russian food and Slavic-Jewish cooking -- even Polish-Jewish. My father was born about 80 miles northeast of Krakow, but his sisters cooked more like your Nonna than like this food.” TJ, meanwhile, was in hog heaven, the stuffed cabbage a close replica of his Nonna’s rendition.

Dawn had the vegetarian pirogi ($10), raviolilike dumplings with the thickish house pasta dough, half of them stuffed with mushrooms, the other half with a refreshingly light (honest!) cabbage filling. Steve had the substantial Polish crepes filled with a savory mushroom mixture ($10). The wine list is short but adequate and reasonable (most bottles in the low $20s, with sufficient by-the-glass choices, including a very well-suited Fetzer Gewürz); even more appropriate are the tasty Polish beers, Okocim and especially the well-balanced Zyweicbeer.

On the return visit, we ate Polish “wrapps.” Duck roulade ($14) had wonderfully rich, greaseless braised duck breast rolled around a sensual stuffing of apricots, prunes, and carrots. It came with a side dish of tasty braised red cabbage, and with an assortment of plain boiled vegetables, including a couple of new potatoes that were fully boiled and then roasted crisp. “That’s the bad side of my grandma’s cooking,” said TJ. “The vegetables were always boiled dead -- all the flavor along with the nutrition goes down the drain with the water.” We also had Zrazy, stuffed beef. (“Whoa, it’s the Cattleman’s Special!” said TJ.) The meat was stuffed with minced bacon, pickles, green pepper (making the dish a sort of an inside-out stuffed pepper), and yet more shredded beef, all braised in a meaty sauce. It came with a covey of small white torpedoes -- potato dumplings, weighty but nicely seasoned. Alongside was a salad of cooked beets and slivered red onions that sent TJ into small ecstasies.

Although half of each giant meat dish had to come home with us, we suffered for our craft and tried desserts. After such enormous meals, we couldn’t really appreciate the weighty cheese-stuffed crepes (with a bittersweet chocolate sauce that night). The tall lemony cheesecake, however, was remarkably light and barely sweet, a fusion of an airy Italian ricotta cheesecake and a New York pot-cheese version. An apple pastry was also refreshing with a crisp crust and the apples tender-firm, united by a heavy but not oversweet syrup.

We were both so thrilled by Old Krakow, we decided to try it at home. Two days later TJ came home with 10 heads of cabbage and a 5-gallon crock. Guess the garage is gonna stink for a while.