In the mid-90s Gosia Pieniazek was waiting tables at Sophie’s Busy Bee, the last Polish restaurant in the immediate orbit of the rapidly gentrifying intersection of Damen, North, and Milwaukee. A recent immigrant, she’d left northern Poland in 1993, at age 19, which makes her old enough to remember the culinary privation of life behind the Iron Curtain.
Lokal’s pierogi are light and silky and dressed in a creamy bourbon-date sauce that Wnorowski came up with at home while perusing the booze left over from a party. The kielbasa is made from dark-meat chicken and served in a whole-grain-mustard demi-glace with lentils and pancetta. And the golabki? It’s not a stewy cabbage-wrapped lump of amalgamated ground beef and rice but a composed take on maki, with horseradish-flavored sushi rice and braised short rib. All these dishes were developed, like the rest of the menu, in collaboration with Gabriel Miranda, the restaurant’s Chicago-born Mexican-American Japanese-trained chef.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Knowing they’d have to battle the perception that central European food is bland and heavy, they auditioned a series of chefs, giving them a list of Pieniazek’s ideas and ingredients and cutting them loose in the kitchen of the former gallery storefront they found on North Avenue. One of the dishes Miranda came up with won them over right away: his take on a Hungarian palacsinta, typically a gut-busting slab of potato pancake folded over a ladleful of goulash and topped with gobbets of sour cream. Miranda used braised short rib and a coarsely shredded Swedish-style pancake in place of the denser Polish variety and topped it off with demi-glace, goat cheese creme fraiche, and crispy onions. It’s still on the menu.
None of the corporate chef gigs he came upon offered enough creative control to make them worth the hassle. “I asked myself, ‘Do I want to live a stressful life for a little bit of money or do I just do what I want to do?’” The chance to interpret Pieniazek’s ideas seemed like a good way to stay sane and employed.
The Heart of Europe: Fourteen Polish restaurants
Serving a dining room about the size of a one-car garage, Andrzej and Anna Burak crank out traditional dishes for a steady stream of Polish folks who know what the food of their homeland should taste like. The list of house-made soups usually includes very good chicken noodle, a tangy sauerkraut and meat, or seasonal “summer soup”: a refreshingly cool pink broth of sour cream, beet, hard-boiled egg, and pickle. Most people fall hard for the stuffed potato pancake enclosing goulash; the most popular item at our table was the platter of peppery meatballs in a creamy mushroom sauce, served—as are many dishes—on boiled potatoes flecked with dill. Uncommon on Chicago menus, the toothsome veal ribs are surprisingly rich; stuffed cabbage, however, is pretty much the expected paper-thin leaves surrounding lots of rice, little meat, and splashed with neutral tomato sauce. There’s also a vegetarian menu section featuring pierogis and salads. Andrzej Grill is BYO; try the European sodas or sample kompot, a Polish fruit water. Most dinners are $8.50; come early—it’s lights-out at 7 PM. —David Hammond
I love the breaded fried pork and veal cutlets at Halina’s. The cutlets, each the size of an elephant ear, include Swedish style (stuffed with mushroom puree), cubao (with white cheese filling), and Wiener schnitzel (the Berghoff’s version was no match). They’re cooked to order and served hot enough to burn your tongue. Polish standbys like pork shank, stuffed cabbage rolls, and pierogi are good too. The indecisive should consider the Polish Plate, a greatest-hits platter with a breaded pork chop, three pierogi, a stuffed cabbage roll, and Polish sausage on sauerkraut. All dinners (except the pierogi) include buttery mashed potatoes and a trio of cold salads: sauerkraut, coleslaw, and beet. The homemade fruit drink, kompot, pale red sugar water made with the juice from leftover fruit (usually strawberry, watermelon, peach, and cantaloupe), tastes a lot like Kool-Aid. —Peter Tyksinski
