Polish Food

[Gangster Octopus]

Stuffed cabbage. I use to hate it.

[Duncan Gardner]

Polish Food

The sausage stand at Ruch Chorzow produces probably the foulest examples of the genre I've ever tasted outside an Irish League ground.

Aye, bigos (think festered Irish stew) is an acquired taste.

[caja-dglh]

Polish Food

Gay Hussar does a great stuffed cabbage - maybe you should have been trying a Hungarian one all along.

[EIM]

Polish Food

Harnas in Old Trafford, just down the road from me, is my favourite. The food is incredible considering it's just pork, cabbage and potato.

http://www.just-eat.co.uk/restaurants-harnas-m16

[Toby Gymshorts]

Polish Food

.

[ursus arctos]

Polish Food

Notwithstanding my heritage, I've never been able to stand stuffed cabbage.

There's a reason why the US has several million Poles and only a relative handful of Polish restaurants.

[Stumpy Pepys]

Polish Food

I went to a wedding in Poland last year. The vodka never stopped coming. Fortunately, neither did the food: they thankfully cancelled each other out.

[Gangster Octopus]

Polish Food

The stuffed cabbage that we used to eat was from the Polish Deli in Rotherham. This was back in the sixties, when a lot of Polish people lived over here. How things change...

[Jah Womble]

Polish Food

I had the opposite problem at my cousin's Polish wedding in 2009. There was no vegetarian food of which to speak, so I got absolutely mashed to pieces on the endless tsunami of vodka on offer.

Earlier that day, I had mushroom broth in a bread bowl (see 'Posh Food' thread).

[treibeis]

Polish Food

There's a German-Polish restaurant about 100 yards from where I work. The dish it advertises most prominently is "Full English breakfast".

There's another place about 100 yards further on that is 'genuinely' Polish. I must admit, I quite like their bigos when the weather's cold.

The Lady I Walked To The Registry Office With once complained about the price (seven euros), claiming she could produce a bowl of 'cabbage and offcut slop' for one-tenth of the price, probably less.

She tried and, although it was - obviously - delicious, it didn't quite hit the spots that bigos did. I suggested using tinned meat (preferably the stuff in the bargain basket, with a dent, or even a hole, in the tin), but she just wouldn't take telling.

[Giggler]

Polish Food

Pawel's Dumplings on Cheetham Hill Road always looks good.

[sw2borshch]

Polish Food

When the red shop was still the green last summer they had loads of bottles of Polish iced tea. I bought it all but they never got any more in.

[MsD]

Polish Food

I love their rye bread, it makes great toast.

Other than that, it's a bit like Russian food, innit. Of which, I like caviar and blinis with smetana and dill, and er, that's about it. They do something like bubble and squeak that's quite nice.

[Alderman Barnes]

Polish Food

My wife's Polish, so we got married there.

The trick with parties in Poland and the constant flow of vodka (which I learnt after a number of catastrophic failures) is to keep eating and keep dancing. Do not let up under any circumstances.

That's a very good point with the day after the wedding. There's always an after-party the next day, where everyone turns up half-dead, but is miraculously revived by the power of the hair of the dog. It's sometimes more fun than the wedding itself.

As for Polish food, it depends whether you were brought up on it or not. For a Pole, there's nothing better. For a non-Pole, it's great if it's cold and/or you've been digging ditches or something, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it.

[Bored Of Education]

Polish Food

The Tescos down the road has a Polish section and it has great pretzels that are half the price and twice as nice as Sainsbury's own brand. The school I teach at has a massive Polish contingent and, during Food week, they brought in beetroot soup, salami and a weird meat dumpling thing. The latter didn't stand up to reheating in bulk in the staff room microwave but the former two were lovely but, yeah, not that different from Hungarian or Czech food that I have tried. Not that there is anything wrong with that.

[ursus arctos]

Polish Food

a weird meat dumpling thing

Pierogi?

They are so ubiquitous here that it's hard to imagine them being seen as "weird". In fact, we just got an all pierogi hipster restaurant.

[Moonlight Shadow]

Polish Food

Some nice pickles at Tesco's,the mushroom ones are lovely.

[Heliotrope]

Polish Food

ursus arctos wrote: In fact, we just got an all pierogi hipster restaurant.

Is Greenpoint not good enough for them?

[ursus arctos]

Polish Food

Greenpoint would laugh in their faces and the prices and portions.

[linus]

Polish Food

I've got a decent polish bakery nearby, the stuffed donuts (paczki) are the main draw, quite good when fresh, and their cakes are OK. No polish dumpling place though, the chinese have cornered that market with three dumpling restaurants in the same neighborhood, and they are all quite popular. They make some with hot broth that you sip with a short straw before gulping, a good call in winter.