Burgers, Spring Rolls & Fish Sticks: The Culinary Diaries of a Polish ‘90s Kid
On 17th June 1992, right in the centre of Warsaw, on the corner of Marszałkowska and Świętokrzyska streets, a highly memorable event took place: the first McDonald’s was opened in Poland. People from the West will likely underestimate the magnitude of this day: to a country in the early years of capitalism and Westernisation, in awe of everything American and desperately seeking ‘modernity’, let’s just say it was a huge deal.
The revolutionary milkshake
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The opening of the first McDonald's in Warsaw, 1992, photo: Cezary Słomiński / PAP
This appears quite obvious when looking at photos from the opening: ladies wore elegant dresses, some men were in suits. The first clients were carefully selected from a pool of artists, journalists and politicians including Jacek Kuroń who cut the ribbon (Kuroń, famous for his charity work, apparently persuaded the American company to make a generous donation for children in need) and the legendary lyricist Agnieszka Osiecka. They drank champagne and milkshakes (described by Polish culinary critic Piotr Bikont as ‘a very tasty milk and ice-cream drink that you sip through a straw’) from plastic cups to celebrate a new beginning.
The iconic Polish zapiekanka – a warm baguette with mushrooms, melted cheese and ketchup – was the most popular fast-food item in the 1970s and 80s, but right after the fall of communism, little stalls with hot dogs and burgers started popping up all around the country, taking the place of zapiekanki stalls and mimicking American staples that hadn’t even made it to Poland yet. Some of the burgers were made with pork, others were just mielone cutlets in a bun, sprinkled with copious amounts of crispy-fried onions and covered with a nondescript ‘hamburger sauce’, yet they were something cool and foreign – and few people knew the taste of a ‘real burger’ anyway. Then American chains like McDonalds, but also Burger King, KFC and Pizza Hut made their entrance onto the Polish market, and Poles flocked to these new establishments which represented so much more than just another place to eat. Having a Big Mac meant we were finally becoming a part of the Western world, which we so desperately wanted to belong to.
‘Buying a Big Mac in Warsaw was revolutionary. In gastronomy, in politics, everywhere’ – we read in an anniversary article published in the daily newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza twenty years later. And even though it might seem funny now, when we are so painfully aware of the negative effects a fast-food based diet has on our health and on the environment, in Poland McDonald’s symbolised a breakthrough and became an important part of one of the craziest decades in our culinary history.
Pioneers of tofu & tortillas
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El Popo restuarant, 2000, photo: Michał Mutor / Agencja Gazeta
‘I have no idea how we did this’, said restauranteur Agnieszka Kręglicka in Oliwia Bosomtwe’s Gastro od Kuchni podcast, when asked how she and her brother found importers of exotic products needed in their pioneering Chinese and Mexican restaurants, which opened in Warsaw in the early nineties.
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I think it was all based on human relationships, lots of quickly gained contacts. We looked for help in the Mexican and American embassies. (…) It was very hard. (…) Yet I think the situations made us think about food in the right way: we imported typical, exotic ingredients, but everything that could grow here, we took from here.
Agnieszka Kręglica and Marcin Kręglicki are Warsaw’s culinary legends: they started with the Chinese (or, more accurately, pan-Asian) restaurant Mekong, then opened the Mexican El Popo (which is still around today), and then went on to open the Italian Chianti and the Greek Santorini and Meltemi. The idea was to create ‘culinary postcards’ from faraway places, where few Polish people had had the opportunity to travel to at the time. At the beginning most of the ingredients and dishes served were hard to get and virtually unknown – while Italian-style food was known in Poland since the 1970s, and there were some attempts to reconstruct Chinese-esque dishes with local ingredients in the 70s and 80s (as Maria Iwaszkiewicz put it in her delightful book Gawędy o Jedzeniu [Stories about Food]in 1972: ‘it seems making a Chinese dish basically means cutting everything into thin strips’), a whole world of flavours was still waiting to be explored. In Kręgliccy’s restaurants all the tofu was made from scratch out of Polish soybeans; special flour was imported to make tortillas, and tequila reigned supreme in the fancy El Popo bar. It was all completely new, and yet, as Piotr Bikont wrote in 1991, the situation changed rapidly:
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After many long years, when the only Chinese restaurant in Warsaw was the culinary misunderstanding called Szanghaj, we observe a promising rise in the number of Eastern joints.
Yugoslavian booths, Vietnamese cooks, Polish tastes
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Vietnamese food stalls on Konstytucji Square, 1996, photo: Longin Wawrynkiewicz / PAP
At the time the word ‘Eastern’ usually meant Vietnamese – there was (and still is) a relatively high number of Vietnamese immigrants, who started coming to Poland as students in the late 1950s; many of them decided to stay and dedicate their lives to gastronomy, opening popular bars and restaurants, and creating a culinary genre which we now like to call Pol-Viet: an adaptation of Chinese and Vietnamese cuisines for Polish palates. A true symbol of this type of gastronomy were the Yugoslavian plastic booths located on Konstytucji Square in Warsaw's city centre. As Bikont, the tireless chronicler of Polish gastronomy in those times, wrote in 1992:
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Bars, bistros, booths, stalls, and markets which represent the phenomenon described in English as ‘fast-food’ are popping up in Warsaw like mushrooms (…) It’s surprising that the Vietnamese, in such primitive conditions, still serve dishes that are better than in any [Asian] restaurant in the capital.
Five-flavour chicken and pork, sweet-and-sour sauce, duck and, last but not least, crispy spring rolls known in Poland as sajgonki, were some of people’s favourites. Viet Huong Quoua, one of the pioneers of Pol-Viet cuisine recalled in an interview for Gazeta Wyborcza:
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If we cooked as we eat in Vietnam, we’d sell nothing. Back then Poles were fascinated by Asian cuisine, but they did not accept those true flavours. (…) They liked sajgonki, breaded chicken, five-flavour chicken, fried rice. Everything with chicken. We cooked with chicken thighs at first, because in Vietnam only children eat chicken breasts. We wondered what was wrong with the thighs, and then a customer said: ‘Listen, Poles don’t like the skin’. Then we all turned to fillets, because one copied the other (…) A specific Pol-Viet cuisine emerged back then. Its main rule was to serve meat with a sauce. Meat without sauce is too dry for Poles. Vietnamese people eat differently: they sip broth with their meal.
What’s interesting is, is that Vietnamese cooks not only used ingredients and methods known to Poles, but they even mimicked the three-part structure of a meal: since we usually have meat, potatoes and some veg, they started serving meat covered in sauce with a side of rice and cabbage slaw, which hardly has anything to do with Vietnam. And yet, even taking into account these modifications and the constant search of the right balance between the exotic and the familiar, just as McDonald’s and the restaurants owned by Agnieszka Kręglicka and Marcin Kręglicki, Vietnamese booths were a window to the world – or to many different worlds, to be exact.
Greatest foods since sliced bread
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Food fair in 1992, photo: Longin Wawrynkiewicz / PAP
Although eating out gained a lot of momentum in the nineties, most Poles still dined at home but what they bought and what they cooked also underwent a huge transformation. Nowadays it’s hard to imagine how one’s culinary world changes when, after decades of shortages, empty shelves, or shelves filled only with Eastern Bloc products, one can finally buy… everything. Exotic fruits, foreign condiments, imported sweets, fizzy drinks, you name it. To be fair – even before 1989 Poland was not completely deprived of Western products – my mother does recall going for a Coke with her school friends in the seventies – yet imported goods were notoriously hard to get, or only available at specific times of the year (such as the legendary ‘oranges for Christmas’).
What also changed was the number of processed foods available: massive quantities of jars, cans, powders, jellies, and frozen foods in colourful packages, which had little to do with raw materials they were made from, filled the shelves of our grocery stores and the first supermarkets which opened all across the country.
As a child of the nineties, some of the foods I remember from that time are: frozen fish sticks and curly fries, which my mother put in the oven and served with a slaw (not to completely abandon fresh produce, and to lessen her guilt as a working mum); Uncle Ben’s sweet-and-sour sauce served with chicken (skinless breast, obviously) and rice (I believe pineapple and bamboo shoots swimming in this slightly cloying gravy were the first taste of Asian for an entire generation!); instant soups – both ‘Asian-style’ instant ramen (produced by the Vietnamese company Vifon, which started importing their products to Poland in 1991, and is still the unquestionable leader in the field) and Polish ‘hot cups’ – powders which you could pour hot water over and get something vaguely resembling żurek or ogórkowa soups – and obviously a whole array of foreign candy, crisps, cookies and chocolate bars.
My husband grew up on toast (Toasters! Packaged sliced bread! American cheese! Nutella! It was all so new!). We’d watch Mentos commercials as if they were short films, and exchange ad slogans in our daily conversations. We’d buy Cheetos and lick our fingers and a get sugar rush from Mars and Snickers – just as the American kids did!
A sudden influx of imported products resulted in a whole lot of new combinations and – to be fair – weird concoctions. My inventive grandmother started adding olives and canned corn to her mayo vegetable salad (sałatka jarzynowa) along with the usual carrots, gherkins, and peas. The combination of pineapple, cheese and ham won our hearts – not only on pizza, but also on toast or in a salad with mayonnaise. Canned tuna, canned beans and canned corn were also bound together by mayo, although in some houses vinaigrette made its entrance. Serving pork, chicken or turkey with canned pineapple and peaches became quite fashionable, just like fruit salads (with fruit from the can, obviously) decorated with sprayed whipped cream – a Polish take on the American ambrosia. Traditional cakes were replaced by crazy inventions from the box, such as kopiec kreta (mole mound) – cream, banana and chocolate cake made to look like a pile of dirt, and Kilimandżaro – a cocoa sponge cake with vanilla custard and apples.
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A hamburger booth in front of the Katowice railway station, photo: Marta Błażejowska / Agencja Gazeta
Nowadays, the nineties, which were romanticised in mainstream media as the ‘decade of freedom and entrepreneurship’, are still remembered with nostalgia by millennials, and now coveted by Generation Z, are also critically analysed by researchers and politicians as a time of drastic, chaotic change, when many people succeeded but many were left behind. This ambiguous assessment of this moment in time can also be applied to food: on the one hand, the shortages of the communist era ended, giving way to a variety of imported goods and new inventions, on the other – many of these inventions were highly processed, made with low-quality ingredients or simply bizarre. Never before had our diet been so varied… but also rarely had it been less healthy.
Looking back, the cuisine of the nineties might seem a bit crazy, but the evolution of Polish taste in the past thirty years seems quite logical: first Poles turned to foreign, yet somehow familiar cuisines (like American and Italian), then fell in love with more exotic flavours (sushi was an huge culinary phenomenon), only to circle back and begin using local and seasonal produce again – yet always remaining open to international inspirations. Being a part of the global food network means not only knowing what to do with foreign ingredients, but also appreciating familiar ones; not only understanding other food cultures, but most of all – celebrating your own.
Written by Natalia Mętrak-Ruda, Sept 2021
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