Ewa Chwilczyńska: It’s very nice to meet you here, in your restaurant.
Karol Okrasa: It’s hard to believe, but I’ve been running this restaurant for eight years now. After eleven years of working at the Bristol Hotel in Warsaw and travelling abroad, I decided to open a restaurant not just for tourists or hotel guests, but also for local customers. I didn’t expect that I'd be doing this for so long, but as you can see I’m still here. I have to admit that this place is a second home to me.
EC: I hear you travel a lot. Where have you been recently?
KO: I visited South Africa and spent a few days in Panama. When I travel to distant countries, I like to venture into the countryside, try real homemade meals, because in this way I can discover something surprising. It's also a lesson in humility for me. Such experiences remind me not to fall too much for some culinary frills appealing only to a narrow group of gourmet cuisine enthusiasts. During my trips, I look for the pure taste of homemade dishes prepared by people who live, keep their livestock, grow crops and eat their meals in the same place.
EC: And where are you going in the near future?
KO: My next project is in South Korea. It won’t be my first visit to that country: a few years ago I took part in a fair in Seoul where I presented Polish cuisine. It was a very interesting and completely new experience for me. I noticed that, for the Koreans, our mushroom soup and bison grass was something completely new. At the same time, their dishes were a big surprise for me. They offered combinations of flavours that I hadn’t known before. We all supposedly know those basic flavours, like umami, sweet, bitter, salty, but the question is how, in what proportions and configurations they're combined. We can always find a combination of flavours that we've never tasted before.
EC: So you liked Korean cuisine?
KO: I was amazed by the culture of grilling. Restaurants serving grilled meat are on almost every corner and everyone can afford such a dinner. I loved the atmosphere it creates, the fact that I can grill my food while chatting with my friends at the table at the same time. I can’t deny that I'd love to bring this idea back to Poland. I’m sure it would work for us as well.