... Restaurant Polakowski (Kraków, Poland)

Few weeks ago we've visited Kraków, one of the most beautiful cities in Poland with plenty fantastic monuments, museums and romantic alleys. We've spent there two wonderful days and without any doubts we can recommend you visiting this city, you won't be disappointed. If you decide to go there you should also visit one of the "Restaurant Polakowski". They are located in 5 places in Kraków, we've been in restaurant at plac Wszystkich Świętych 10.

It's my favourite restaurant in Kraków. I knew I need to show it to Bartek.

DECOR

Inside are about 12-15 tables so you should find a free chairs without any problem. But it's very popular place so... if there won't be any free table you should be a bit patient and wait few minutes. About the place... It looks very nice and clean. And the decore is fine, based on polish folklor.

I know that the decor may seem a bit tacky, but suprisingly it fits :) Also considering such a big amount of people eating in this place... it's really clean. 

WHAT TO EAT

First - you need to try Żurek. It's a Polish specialty and I've never eaten as good Żurek as in Polakowski. It's thick and has mushrooms, sausage, bacon and can have either egg or potatoes. Beside you have a photo of half of the portion (you can buy half or full portion).

Bartek took fish soup which was also full of everything :)

For the second plate... Schabowy with french fries. Yes, schabowy. Schabowy in maxi size :)

For me delicious pierogi with strawberries. I needed to wait for them like 20 minutes but it was worth it!

The food was really good and the size of dishes were... great, just take a look at photos. :)

PRICES

Prices are very good. For the second plate you can pay less that 10 zloty. And the portion will be enough even for big guys.

Prices are really, really fine. For full two dishes for the persons we've paid only about 30-35 zloty. Absolutely great, especially if you take a look at the size of dishes.

SERVICE

"Restaurant Polakowski" is self-service place so you are choosing your meals and after few minutes you have to take your plates from the service desk. When you finished you also have to give back your plates.

And women that take the orders doesn't have a light job :) Also they often can offer you a try of the dish so you can decide.

SUMMARY

DECOR ***

WHAT TO EAT ***** 

PRICES ****

SERVICE ***

Still it's my favourite restaurant in Kraków :)

In my opinion "Restaurat Polakowski" is very nice place with great food in fantastic prices. :) If you visit Kraków and you don't want to spend a lot of money on food, you should defenitely go there.

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... Burgermeister (Berlin, Germany)

Recently we've been in Berlin for few days. A week or two before our trip we've found a great site where somebody wrote about very popular for Berliners cheap places with food. We decided that we have to go to at least one of them. And that's why we've eaten in "Burgermester".

Also as we asked our friend who live in Berlin, he said: definitely. It's great.

DECOR

It's really hard to say anything about the decor of the place because "Burgermesiter" is located in... old Berlin's public toilet (of course after renovation and adaptation). :) But I have to say that this is absolutely fantastic way to preserve small part of the history of the city. Maybe that's nothing, but this old toilets were really... stylish. ;)

I would say that decor is maximally useful. You do not sit on chairs. You sit on pipes with cushins (so you won't get too comfortable and occupy your place for too long). Some people sit on beer crates. On the tables you can find hanged bottle openers and paper towels. And that's it. Maximum usability.

[We couldn't make pictures because it's forbidden]

WHAT TO EAT

Of course you can eat there burgers! Fantastic, big and really tasty burgers. Great and well-prepared meat, fresh vegetables and tasty bread roll... :D You can also take fries, just fries or with some extras ingredients like meat with chili peppers. To drink: beer.

The burgers were AWESOME. Juicy meat, very good sauce and cheese. We also took beer and chillifries. Chilli fries were made with fresh and hot chilli (I needed to avoid chilli ;)) It was really good and cheesy. However I wouldn't recommend to take besides burgers (unless you are starving). After we ate our burgers we needed to somehow squeeze in the fries and still we managed to eat only 3/4 of it.

PRICES

As I remember the prices were fine, they didn't destroy our wallets. :)

The prices were reasonable however you should count like 3-5 euro for a burger and 2-3 euro for chilli fries. We payed for 2 burgers, half of the fries and beer AFAIR 13 euro.

SERVICE

Service had really much to do. The line was long and people were hungry. Also they managed to clean the tables.

I don't know what to write, because I've only taken our food when it was ready. ;)

SUMMARY

DECOR **** (for usability)

WHAT TO EAT ****

PRICES ***

SERVICE ***

Absolutely great place with fantastic burgers! :D

Highly recommended place for burger lovers!

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... Pizzeria Retro (Dubrovnik, Croatia)

And now another part of our Dubrovnik journey. This time we lived in different part of the city and we got a chance to try something from Pizzeria Retro (Obala Pape Ivana Pavla II 52). We came there because we got starving and it looked not so expensive but still interesting.

Pizzeria is just next to the port in Dubrovnik (there's also Main Bus Station). :)

DECOR

Outside it looks fresh and clean. Inside... dark and not so great (like old pub). But in Lodz it's normal so I feel almost like home ;)

Still inside was also clean.

WHAT TO EAT

First day we got pizza (it was Margherita I think) and seafood pasta. And I think pizza was very nice but pasta was... not worth it. It was pasta with tomatoes and some shrimps and oysters. Wasn't worth the price.

True. Pizza was definitely better - very nice dough, tasty sauce, good cheese. And pasta was just... without flavor.

Second day we got dalmatian pizza (buffalo mozzarella, sausage, prosciutto and I think other cheeses) and Bartek took cheeseburger. Pizza was very good. Intensive taste and good thin crust. Bartek's cheese didn't look so good but tasted... great! I couldn't tell which one is better. You should try it.

Yeees... Pizza was very good! :) But also my cheeseburger was great, especially meat! :)

PRICES

Prices were reasonable (lowest in the neighbourhood). I think 47 kunas for a pizza. 

Pizza costed 40-60 kunas, the cheeseburger about 25-30 kunas.

SERVICE

As far as I remember (and service flaws I remember for a long time) we didn't have any problem with service. It was ok.

SUMMARY

DECOR *** 3/5

WHAT TO EAT **** 4/5

PRICES **** 4/5

SERVICE **** 3/5

Overall I think it was a nice place to eat. If you are in the neighbourhood and you are hungry - you can surely go there and eat nice food.

Pizzeria Retro was a really nice place. So, if you are waiting for a bus or ship (or you are just after a trip) you can go there and eat something tasty in  a good price.

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... Pizzeria & Spaghetteria Storia (Dubrovnik, Croatia)

This one will be short. We've read that Balkans are great to taste Italian food but cheaper. It wasn't cheap but we wanted pizza. So we ended in Pizzeria & Spaghetteria Storia (Kneza Damjana Jude 4).

It's just on the way to Maritime Museum in Dubrovnik. :)

DECOR

Storia is located at the street which is quite narrow and between walls. So by the one wall are located tables.

photo: vidiworld.com

We didn't go inside because outside was very nice.

 

As you can see there are few tables outside: 3-4 for couples and 1-2 longer for families.

 

WHAT TO EAT

 

Well... pizza of course. We didn't try any spaghetti but, as we sneak peaked on the other tables, it looked very nice. We ordered seasonal salad, which looked like this:

 

It was basically just some vegetables with salt, pepper and olive oil. Still - quite good.

Pizza wasn't very fancy but still tasty, italian-type pizza with thin crust and few good ingredients.

 

Both pizza and salad was fine and tasty.

PRICES

It was the cheapest pizzeria in the whole old town. You could buy a margherita pizza for about 47 CHDK and other pizzas were just a bit more expensive. Eather way - it was the cheapest but still good.

SERVICE

The service looked very nice and tried to be as helpful as possible. One waitress looked quite bored but maybe she had a bad day. We didn't have any problems with getting through in English.

And, what is very important, we didn't wait very long. Maybe 5 minutes for salad and about 10-15 minutes for pizza.

SUMMARY

I would say that this is a good place with reasonable (as for Dubrovnik's old city) prices.

Nice place with fine food and prices. :)

Decor: **** (4/5)

Food: **** (4/5)

Prices: *** (3/5)

Summary: **** (4/5)

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... Konoba Tabak (Dubrovnik, Croatia)

If you go to Dubrovnik, you might be amazed about it's old city, beautiful seaside... and prices in restaurants that are adjusted to salaries of western Europeans. So if you are from Eastern Europe you might find yourself in situation where everything is ridiculously expensive especially when you count exchange rates. For example the worth of croatian kuna in polish currency is about 0,5. So you might expect that prices wouldn't be bigger than polish ones. But unfortunately in Dubrovnik - they are.

Expensive, especially if you want to eat in the Old Town, inside the City Walls or near it. There you will pay a lot of money, you can be sure of that. So, if you don't want to waste all of your money you should try to find a restaurant further from the most famous and popular historical places. 

So we decided to ask our landlord where to eat and he recomended Konoba Tabak (Vukovarska 34).

We lived in private house about 2 km away from the City Walls so we were looking for something in our neighbourhood. :)

DECOR

Tabak is a small place but has a big outside area (not very pleasant because it's almost on the parking lot). We haven't really seen inside because we were there in summer so we wanted to catch the weather :)* Outside you have many tables which are clean and under the shades. There was a fan... but it wasn't enough for Croatian summer. ;) 

*However we do know that the bathroom is clean and really nice.

What is imortant, the restaurant is a bit hidden because it's not just next to the street. You have to walk inside the backyard, pass one building and then you'll see the place. Thankfully near the gate is a sign and today's menu. :)

WHAT TO EAT

Konoba Tabak offers regional, really tasty food. Each day you will have some specials to choose from and some menu a'la carte. The food is local. Most of the clients are Croatian and service is not really used to tourists but they do their best.

But the menu is just a suggestion, beacause they don't prepare every dish every day - they just don't have all ingredients (e.g. they couldn't serve some fish beacause that day they wasn't able to buy it on the local market).

Menu looks like this:

First day we got black risotto which is a risotto with cuttlefish ink and seafood...

And pasta with meat pieces...

Some time later we got seasonal grilled fish which for me was red mullet...

 

There is a story about this red mullet because I didn't know names of the fish and I didn't know which one I want. Waiter brought to me a platter of fresh fish and let me choose the one I wanted. It was really cool because fish looked fresh and tasty (all of them). In Poland they wouldn't show you what they will be cooking for you ;) (in most of the restaurants).

And for Bartek grilled sardines. On the side you can see potatoes and collard greens.

And the third day Bartek got cevapi

and I got beef stew. It was tasty... but I'm not really a fan of cooked potatoes. And unfortunately that day they didn't have almost anyhing from the menu. Just like they were short of everything.

PRICES

Prices are really good. They are lower that in most of the restaurants of Dubrovnik. Sometimes even 40-50%. 50 kunas for cuttlefish ink risotto and 47 for grilled fresh fish. It is really affordable.

SERVICE

Waiters that served us were really nice and helpful. One of them had problems with English but he tried and we were able to get our food :) However last visit was quite a let down because we couldn't get from our waiter an information what we can eat and in the end it came out that he got us more expesive beer, that we didn't really wanted. But it was ok.

 

Yes, he was doing his best to explain everything. :)

SUMMARY

For me it was one of the best restaurants during our vacations.

Very nice place with great food, especially seafood, and fine prices. :)

Decor: *** (3/5)
Food: **** (4/5)
Prices: **** (4/5)
Summary: **** (4/5)

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