Food
What to eat in Wrocław
Start with the dishes. Wrocław eats Polish food, with a Silesian accent and a long eastern inheritance, because after 1945 many of its new residents came from the east, Lwów among them, and brought their cooking with them.
The Polish table
Pierogi are the place to begin. Filled dumplings, savoury or sweet. The classic savoury fillings are potato with fresh quark cheese and fried onion (ruskie, from Ruthenia, the historic lands of what is now Ukraine, and nothing to do with Russia), sauerkraut with mushrooms, minced meat, and spinach. The sweet ones are filled with fruit, such as cherries, blueberries, strawberries or plums, or with sweetened quark, and eaten with sour cream.
Żurek is a sour soup made from fermented rye, usually served with white sausage and egg. Bigos is a hunter's stew of sauerkraut and cabbage with several kinds of meat and sausage, and mushrooms. Gołąbki are cabbage leaves rolled around minced meat and rice or groats, served in a mushroom, dill or tomato sauce. Placki ziemniaczane are potato pancakes: grated potato, onion, egg, flour and marjoram.
And pączki, Polish doughnuts, usually filled with fruit preserves such as rose petal, plum or apple, and iced. They are eaten all year, but the day that belongs to them is Tłusty Czwartek, Fat Thursday: the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, the last chance to eat richly before Lent. It moves with Easter, so it is on a different date each year; the year page is the place to look.
The inheritance
Dishes that came from Lwów.
After the Second World War the border moved and Wrocław, which had been German Breslau, filled with Polish settlers. Many came from the east, among them people from Lwów, now Lviv in Ukraine. They brought their habits, including what they cooked. An ethnographer who has studied Lower Silesian Christmas Eve tables describes how much of what is served there is Lwów's: kutia, a ritual dish of wheat, poppy seed and nuts; pierogi filled with buckwheat and sauerkraut and served with a sauce of forest mushrooms; beetroot borscht; herring in sour cream. In a city built on arrivals, the dishes of one lost city became the traditions of another.
Silesia on the plate, and the forest
Wrocław is the historic capital of Lower Silesia, and Silesia has a Sunday dinner of its own. Kluski śląskie are soft potato dumplings, made from boiled mashed potato and potato starch. The classic plate pairs them with rolada, fried beef roulade in rich gravy, and modra kapusta, boiled red cabbage: for many traditional Silesian families the dinner for Sundays and feast days. The Polish agriculture ministry recognises the dumplings as a regional food of the Silesian and Opole voivodeships, to the south-east of Wrocław. These are the dishes of Silesia as a whole; this page does not promise how many kitchens in Wrocław itself make them.
Then there is the forest. Gathering wild mushrooms, grzybobranie, is a national habit in Poland, with the main season running from late summer into autumn, a few days after rain. Dried forest mushrooms carry the flavour through the winter, into soups, sauces, bigos, gołąbki, and the Christmas Eve pierogi above.
Where the city eats
Hala Targowa, the market hall, was built when the city was Breslau, as one of two market halls built there. It was designed by Richard Plüddemann and Heinrich Küster, and its roof rests on reinforced-concrete arches. A major renovation was completed in 1983. See the Market Hall page.
The bar mleczny, the milk bar, is a Polish institution. The first opened in Warsaw in 1896, selling dairy. After the Second World War the state turned them into a national network of subsidised canteens so that every worker, student and pensioner could have a hot meal. The menu was built on dairy and simple cooking: milk soups, pierogi leniwe (lazy dumplings made with cottage cheese), rice with fruit. Milk bars survived the end of communism and are part of Polish life across the country.
And beneath the Ratusz, in the medieval cellars of the Old Town Hall, is Piwnica Świdnicka. The name comes from Świdnica, the town that sent strong dark beer to Wrocław in the Middle Ages.
Coffee and beer
Poland has been a coffee-drinking country for centuries. The drink reached it from the Ottoman world in the seventeenth century, and the café, somewhere to sit for an hour over a cup and a slice of cake, has been part of town life ever since.
Beer has deeper roots here than the recent craft boom suggests. From the sixteenth century into the eighteenth, Breslau was famous for Schöps, a strong wheat ale with a honey-and-nutmeg flavour whose fame reached beyond Silesia, and which vanished over two centuries ago with no recipe preserved.
Before you go
Dumplings, sour soup, a doughnut on the right Thursday, and a look at the market hall and the Town Hall cellars: that is the outline of a Wrocław meal. The venues named here are named for their history, not as recommendations.