The Flavours We Share: Surprising Connections Between Polish & Asian Cuisines

wietnamska_forum-0636972714.jpg, default, An Asian bar in a neighbourhood in Warsaw, photo: Włodzimierz Wasyluk/Forum, The Flavours We Share: Surprising Connections Between Polish & Asian Cuisines

#polish cuisine

A fondness for the sour taste of fermented vegetables, especially cabbage, is something that connects Polish cuisine with the traditional tastes of Korea. The bouncy texture of Korean tteokbokki is reminiscent of Silesian dumplings – kluski śląskie. We have fallen in love with ramen so easily because an umami-rich noodle soup is so close to our hearts in the form of rosół. The Vietnamese diaspora living in Warsaw in the 1990s has created a unique style of fusion cuisine that we now call ‘pol-viet’.

Asian food, PRL style

In the 1960s, there was one Chinese restaurant in Warsaw – it was an elegant place called Szanghai, frequented mostly by politicians and diplomats. You could get a couple of simple Chinese dishes in the headquarters of the Towarzystwo Przyjaźni Polsko-Chińskiej (Polish-Chinese Friendship Society), and a decade later a Vietnamese spot called Ha Long was opened, but that’s about it. In her 1972 book Gawędy o jedzeniu (Food Talk), culinary author Maria Iwaszkiewicz wrote about a French edition of a Chinese cookbook she got from her friends, who assured her that the original Chinese cuisine is ‘so much more delicious than the one served in Szanghai’. Not being able to get most of the ingredients, she created the following concoction:

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Cover of the book ‘Gawędy o jedzeniu’, author: Maria Iwaszkiewicz, 1972. Cover of the book ‘Kuchnie azjatyckie’, authors: Zofia Borzymińska, Krzysztof Gawlikowski and others, 1978, photo: Wydawnictwo Watra

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First, a roux made with whatever fat and a bit of flour; then salt, sugar and black pepper; ground paprika – very spicy, the kind you get from Hungary or Bulgaria in the summer – and marinated bell peppers, cut into thin strips.

Generally everything that this dish consists of is cut into thin strips. The proportions are a question of our intuition. Then we add roasted pork loin, not too fatty, celeriac and parsley roots cooked in a broth, and some peas. Shredded lettuce and chicory instead of bamboo shoots and pickled yellow knight mushrooms […] instead of mun mushrooms. The sauce is thickened with a puree of white beans. Then we add a glass of dry vermouth and cook the whole thing for fifteen to twenty minutes. Serve with rice.

Even though the taste of this vermouth-bean sauce with thin strips of things in it might be painful to imagine even without the Chinese-like context, the sources for Asian cuisine were so scarce that it might not have been as shocking a recipe for the readers of the time as it is for us. The first book devoted entirely to Asian cuisines, Kuchnie azjatyckie (Asian Cuisines) was published in 1978; its authors still advised readers how to make dishes somehow resembling the original without half of the necessary ingredients.

The nineties Vietnamese craze

All of this started to change in the late 1980s, when commercial relations between Poland and Asia started to expand, LOT airlines made Bangkok one of their destinations and businesspeople slowly begun to travel more. Yet the boom came in the 1990s when so-called pol-viet cuisine was born.

Vietnamese students started arriving in Warsaw and other Polish cities in the mid-20th century, and for the past decades the Vietnamese have been by far the biggest Asian diaspora in Poland. There were 100 times more ‘Vietnamese bars’ in Poland in 2016 than there were McDonalds’. It all started in the 1990s with carts, booths and little eateries, which were opened by the Vietnamese yet often had Chinese names and a vaguely Chinese décor – red walls, golden dragons, paper lanterns, you name it. The most famous dish of the time were sajgonki – deep-fried spring rolls filled with ground meat, vegetables and glass noodles. The food wasn’t super authentic – as Lê Thanh Hải writes in an interesting article, Pogranicze smaków. Antropologiczna refleksja o rozwoju wietnamskiej kuchni w Polsce od lat 90 (Borderland of Flavours: An Anthropological Reflection on the Development of Vietnamese Cuisine in Poland Since the 1990s), dishes such as lòng lợn and tiết canh (intestines and blood jelly) were deemed to be too challenging for the Polish diner, and Poles were not yet accustomed to having just soup as their main meal, so cooks decided to mimic the classic three-part Polish obiad – a meat, a starch and a veg. And so, dishes such as deep-fried battered chicken balls, sweet-n-sour pork and five-flavour chicken were born, all served with rice and the favourite of Poles: slightly sweet cabbage slaw. Only much later would ‘authentic’ Vietnamese eateries such as Viet Street Food in Warsaw and Wiệtnam in Kraków become popular among foodies. ‘Poles in recent years have grown to appreciate the lightness of Vietnamese cuisine, the huge number of herbs and fresh vegetables used’, says Ngoc Diep, a Polish-Vietnamese restauranteur based in Warsaw. ‘We’ve always shared an affinity for fermented cabbage, onions and garlic, grilled meats and black pudding.’ And also soup.

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Stuffed wings dish at a Vietnamese bar, 2000, photo: Waldemar Sosnowski/AW

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The pho craze began, mostly due to the Vietnamese food stalls at Stadion Dziesięciolecia, which between 1989 and 2008 was used as the biggest market in Europe. It became the favourite meal of Warsaw party goers: this reinvigorating and satiating noodle soup was not completely foreign due to its resemblance to the Polish rosół, yet its spicy intensity became a point of interest. After the market was closed and the new National Stadium took its place, the most determined pho vendors emigrated either to the Vietnamese neighbourhoods of Bakalarska and Wólka Kosowska – which are Warsaw’s ‘Little Hanois’ – or to the city centre. For a good part of the second decade of the 21st century, pho was the Polish capital’s favourite soup. Yet it seems that now it has been replaced by a different Asian noodle-based delicacy.

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Vietnamese bar on the site of the former 10th-Anniversary Stadium in Warsaw, 2008, photo: Michał Kośc/AW

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The comforts of ramen

‘Ramen is the noodle!’ – argue food experts annoyed at people who call it a soup. And yes, technically ramen is a type of wheat noodle, but it’s also a dish we Poles came to love in the past decade. Again, it’s a mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar: we have a broth rich in umami (a taste which is also very present in Polish cuisine thanks to various meats and mushrooms), noodles, vegetables and an egg, which we are accustomed to adding to soups (think of żurek [sour rye soup] and szczawiowa [sorrel soup]). Yet we also have fish cakes, seaweed and a rather complicated technique of mixing the broth with tare and a flavoured oil. Combined, it is the perfect blend of the familiar and the exotic, which makes for a delightful signature dish of a culinary culture.

Japanese cuisine, of course, became known in Poland much earlier, but only thanks to one item: sushi. In many ways, it was a symbolic dish: in the 1990s it represented the modern business lunch for new big-city generation-X executives. Eating sushi meant leaving tradition behind and opening oneself up to a new world of raw fish, weird green horseradish and smelly seaweed. The sushi in Poland was obviously Westernized – we enjoyed California rolls more than sashimi, but it was an introduction to what came later – a full-blown Asian food craze.

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Vegan AF Ramen restaurant on Oławska Street in Wrocław, photo: Tomasz Pietrzyk/AW

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Masters of culinary diplomacy

Thai and Korean cuisines are among those that are gaining popularity the quickest – not just in Poland but all over the Western world thanks to great efforts in culinary diplomacy. In the 21st century, everyone – Poles included – learned about Pad Thai (one of Poland’s favourite take-out dishes, according to the report about food trends published by Pyszne.pl in 2023), colourful Thai curries, as well as kimchi, Korean barbecue and even chewy rice dumplings, tteokbokki.

When it comes to Thailand, the refreshing flavours of ginger, lemongrass and kaffir lime combined with the vibrant spiciness of chilies turn Central European winters from drab to Technicolor. Thailand has become quite a popular destination for wealthier Poles, and its hustle, its intensity and its all-round ‘vacation’ quality made us want to recreate the experience at home. We have become so accustomed to the popular red and green curries, summer rolls and tom yum soup that we are now – just as with Vietnamese cuisine – entering the stage when we are ready to explore the more challenging flavours of beef hearts, fermented sausages and spicy fish curries as presented by restaurants such as Ahaan in Warsaw and Ryż in Gdańsk.

Korean food has found its way into Polish hearts in recent years not just thanks to its comforting and health qualities but also due to the unexpected similarities to be found between these two seemingly completely different cuisines. We share a fondness for fermented cabbage and other types of pickles; we like hearty meat stews; even the chewy rice noodles tteokbokki are similar in texture to our beloved Silesian dumplings.

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Kimchi, photo: Ana Fernandez/Zuma Press/Forum

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The knowledge Poles have about Asian cuisine has evolved greatly from the times of Maria Iwaszkiewicz and even the Vietnamese booths of the 1990s. But what about the other way around? Unfortunately, Poland doesn’t have a cohesive culinary strategy comparable to that of some Asian countries, yet Polish culinary experts such as Maciej Nowicki, Aleksander Baron and Magdalena Tomaszewska-Bolałek have started promoting our culinary culture with the support of embassies and institutions such as IAM.

“Both Poles and many Asians love umami (even if sometimes we’re not even aware of it). When I talk about it in my lectures and meetings, a common understanding is quickly formed. Even in such places as Singapore, where Polish cuisine is virtually unknown, mushrooms, bacon and lovage are a real point of interest, just as pierogi and other dumplings are’, says culinary diplomacy expert and food writer Magdalena Tomaszewska-Bolałek. Polish dishes, which are rich in umami, smoked meats, fermented vegetables and distinctive herbs and spices such as marjoram, caraway seeds and lovage can be a delight and an inspiration for people from very different culinary cultures.

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