A culinary revival is taking place in northern Poland—here's why

"Welcome to the dungeon,” jokes Anna Lisakowska, as she and her husband Piotr lead me into an abandoned Second World War bunker. I tiptoe behind Piotr through the lightless concrete structure. “This is my happy place,” says Piotr. We turn a corner, go down a slippery ramp and enter a room filled with large blue barrels. Piotr removes the lid on one, snaps on latex gloves and sloshes into the concoction. “We have to make sure the fish aren’t sticking to one another,” he says before tilting his headlamp to reveal thousands of anchovies he’s been fermenting for two years.

“It took me 10 years to perfect this recipe,” he continues. “It originally comes from an 1840 cookbook from Anna’s great-grandmother. She used sprats.” Piotr grabs a fish, guts it and hands it to me. I chomp down and am blown away by the explosion of flavour — sweet, salty, gingery, meaty; nothing pungent or funky as with many fish preserved for this long. “This is natural food,” says Anna. “It takes time. You’re unable to get it whenever you want, but the health quality is much better. Are you ready to eat now?”

I’m in the Hel Peninsula, in the historical region of Pomerania, which skirts the Baltic Sea on the northern shores of Poland and Germany. Here, in the Tricity region — encompassing the cities of Gdańsk, Sopot and Gdynia — a Hanseatic seafaring heritage intermingles with Polish, German and Kashubian culinary traditions, the latter relating to a northern Polish Slavic ethnic group with its own language. Centuries-old recipes are being rediscovered and revealed on plates across the region, creating a scene that’s become so intriguing that Gdańsk was named the European Capital of Gastronomic Culture for 2025-26.

In the far north, in the beach town of Jastarnia, Anna and Piotr drive me down a bucolic rural road they’ve jokingly named ‘Highway to Hel’, leading to their one-table restaurant, Gryfon. I’m here for brunch but also, it becomes clear, for a history lesson, as everything chef Piotr prepares has a backstory rooted in old Polish or Kashubian culture, or fishermen folklore. First up is cod liver, which Piotr calls “local foie gras” ­— a nod to 1920s Polish cuisine. He serves it with a sweet rosehip wine. The delicate bite evaporates in my mouth. “Sweet and salty is the local palate,” says Piotr. Next up, a whipped butter that’s been mixed with homemade garum, a fish sauce made from the two-year-fermented anchovies. This is to be eaten with salmon and eel that Piotr has smoked over plum wood, a tradition here stretching back over 6,000 years.

I tuck in and am so overtaken by the unctuous fattiness of the eel that I sit back in my chair. We finish up with freshly baked challah and his famous anchovies, which he sells in jars at the restaurant and markets throughout the Tricity. “Are you feeling courageous?” Piotr asks, and out comes the booze — rosé, beer, vodka. He scoops out three handmade ice cream flavours: wild rose, pinewood (served with dried pine needles and pinecones) and herring, all to be washed down with herring vodka. “This is the taste of the air here,” says Piotr. “Wildflowers, trees and the sea. Sweet and salty.” It’s a memorable start to my journey, even though the herring ice cream lingers on my tongue longer than I’d like.

Farming, fishing & fermenting

From Hel, I head south, driving through the marshy fishing villages of Swarzewo, Rewa and Mechelinki, where pastel boats decorate steely Baltic shores. My next stop is in the elegant spa town of Sopot, known for its grand art nouveau mansions and for having the longest wooden pier in Europe. Here, culinary wunderkind Rafał Koziorzemski helms the kitchen at Fisherman, where the menu is based on culinary intuition. “Sometimes I wake up with an idea for a dish. Other times, I’ll have flashbacks from my grandmother’s cooking and remember something she taught me,” says Rafał, as he greets me at his cosy, candlelit restaurant. “I’ll write it down and try to recreate it the next day.” There’s everything from Polish-style sashimi to Asian-influenced fish cakes, but his signature creation is paprikash. “This is from the communist days,” he says. “It was a cheap, filling dish for fishermen. They used vegetables and leftover fish scraps.” Rafał’s iteration is a reclamation of the humble stew. “I wanted to elevate it in quality and give it honour.” Scallops and liver pâté replace scraps and each bite is buttery, cut through with the spicy paprika. I devour the plate in five bites.

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While seafood is a mainstay along the coast, inland there’s earthy bounty. I head to Sopot’s neighbour, Gdynia, to stroll around the Hala Targowa farmers’ market, set in a vast concrete hall. Under domed glass ceilings, I scope out jars of homemade jams and preserves, sample pickles, gawk at the basketball-sized heads of cabbage and try naming all 12 mushroom varieties that one vendor has foraged in the nearby Kashubian Lake District. Close to the market, in a bakery window, I spot a pączki (a freshly fried doughnut filled with rose petal jam) and pop in for one — well, two.

A short jaunt from the town centre is my next stop, Biały Królik (White Rabbit), where chef Marcin Popielarz prepares a vegetable-forward feast from the idyllic confines of an 18th-century manor. Marcin cut his chops in Michelin-starred kitchens in London and Oslo before returning to Poland to help put this region on the culinary map. His menu is an evolution of Kashubian cooking, which he describes as simple, seasonal and flavourful, although he says many of the techniques used in Kashubian kitchens — such as smoking, fermenting, cold marinating and the delicate use of seasoning — may take chefs eight to 10 years to master. The one rule in Marcin’s kitchen: “you need to taste the time [it takes to prepare] in the flavour”. Reflecting this ethos are dishes such as kale prepared three ways, involving frying it and extracting oil from its leaves. Then there’s a sweet-and-salty quail with beetroot and an impeccably rich duck with hibiscus that takes Marcin five days to prepare and is meant to mimic duck blood soup, a traditional staple. It’s so good — meaty, sharp and sweet — that I drink the remaining sauce directly from the carafe. For dessert, a white blueberry cheesecake substitutes sugar for honey from Marcin’s apiary. It’s a subtly fragrant, slightly sour, creamy finale.

I ask Marcin about his future plans, as he also runs Hewelke, a pub in Gdańsk, and is opening a restaurant in Hel next year. The chef tells me he’s aching for the Kashubian countryside and its food. “There are a lot of recipes there that you only see made at home,” he says.

A Kashubian kick

To get a better understanding of this culture, I call up cheesemaker Tomasz Strubiński and ask if I can visit him on his farm, Kaszubska Koza. Tomasz is the godfather of Kashubian cuisine and knows just about every chef in the area, all of whom call him ‘Koza’ — meaning ‘goat’ — on account of their love for his prized goat’s cheeses.

Tomasz’s farm is two hours from Gdańsk in the Kashubian Lake District. I snake through the countryside, passing farmsteads, glacial lakes, nature reserves and colonnades of birch and pine. Two-way roads narrow into single-lane dirt tracks, where, to my alarm, I notice numerous cars seemingly abandoned on the roadside. But I soon realise they’re not broken down, but rather their drivers are off foraging for mushrooms. One woman emerges with two full baskets.

On arrival at the farm, I’m greeted with the unexpected sound of someone singing. It turns out Tomasz is serenading his goats. He tells me his family, including his wife, make goat’s cheese “the traditional way”. This means, along with singing, herding roughly 80 goats a day to be milked by hand, and quickly transforming the milk into cheese. Every half-hour Tomasz checks on the status of his cheeses while simultaneously smoking some as well. The impressive set-up has earned Kaszubska Koza accolades worldwide. “Our cheeses are special because we make them with great passion and love,” he says. “We make everything ourselves, grow the right plants for the goats to graze and make sure the goats are happy and stress free.”

Tomasz prepares a tasting for me with two signature cheeses: Kozia Rura, which is his take on the French, log-shaped buche de chèvre rind cheese, and Pijana Koza (‘drunk cheese’), which is soaked in pomace brandy. The Kozia Rura is fluffy, light and slightly sour with some grassy notes, whereas the boozy Pijana Koza melts in the mouth, like cheesecake. And there are more: cheeses spiced with chilli, horseradish and thyme, and even a nutty cheddar.

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I ask Tomasz what it’s like to be continuing the legacy of Kashubian cheesemaking. “The traditions of any given region should be considered sacred,” he replies. “What would the world be without them? A shapeless mass?”

Tomasz packs me wedges of his two signature cheeses for the road, and I drive to the village of Otomin, where Agata Falkiewicz-Ponikowska is waiting for me at Tabun, part restaurant, part horse farm and part cidery. Here, Agata presents what she calls “seasonal, Polish-Kashubian cooking with a kick”. The menu features classics, including house-smoked meats and slow-fermented bread, as well as offering new takes on heritage recipes. “We like to keep it traditional but also modern,” she says. “We use a lot of ingredients from the forest, like mushrooms, berries and wild boar, and in winter our speciality is goose.”

Agata starts me off with some award-winning cider, made by her husband Michał, along with a bowl of žurek, a peppery, sour soup made with smoked sausage, mushrooms and potatoes. Next, one of those ‘Kashubian dishes with a kick’: a swede steak with creamy kale and buckwheat, It’s nourishing, nutty and a comfort in the cold weather. A thick slice of apple pie and a boozy, spiced cider with anise cinnamon and cardamom completes the meal, enjoyed beside a crackling fireplace.

The following day, I head eight miles east to Gdańsk, a handsome Hanseatic city webbed with canals, where I explore the Tastes of Gdańsk map, an initiative highlighting restaurants serving storied dishes. At wharf-front Tygle I sample an earthy buckwheat risotto with tender beef cheek, while at 108-year-old restaurant Kubicki, a traditional crayfish soup precedes roast duck with red cabbage, raisins and currants (again, that familiar sweet-salty combo). And at Piwnica Rajców, dishes include pillowy Kashubian pierogi with goat’s cheese, kale and beetroot.

“This is, historically, the culinary crossroads of Poland,” says Dominik Karpik, executive chef at the venerable Mercato and chef at new restaurant MDWA. And the city, he notes, is currently seeing “a culinary renaissance”. Mercato’s menu traces the city’s commercial golden age, when regular shipping lines connected Gdańsk with over 90 ports around the world. Each menu ingredient could’ve been found in one of the many markets throughout the city back in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. His first offering is Bismarck herring marinated in onion syrup. “You’ll find the herring at markets throughout the region, but the onion syrup is a Kashubian trick,” says Dominik. “It’s what our grandmothers would give us to help with coughs.” He follows this up with an earthy rabbit leg, served over mushrooms and a mushroom cream, and concludes with a cheesecake resplendent in nuts and both fresh and dried fruits.

“This is simple, flavourful food,” he says. “The most important thing for us is understanding nature.” Dominik, much like Marcin, Tomasz, Agata and Piotr, finds solace in the surrounding countryside. “I dream of sitting in my cabin, eating fish that I caught and mushrooms that I picked, breathing in the air,” he says.

Leaving the restaurant, I find myself by the riverside. In the distance is the gabled architecture of the Old Town, a 13th-century crane that once unloaded spices and timber from around the world, and the outline of the Kashubian hills. I take in the spectacle and the crisp, chilly air. It’s sweet and salty.