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48 hours in Warsaw: Europe’s most underrated city

By Eleanor Halls

Warsaw legend is that Chopin’s heart resides in the Holy Cross Church, preserved in a jar of his sister’s finest cognac, after she smuggled it across borders in her winter coat and a local hero hid the jar from the Nazis during their occupation. It’s one of the many tales that gives this underrated Polish capital its unique charm and endless intrigue – a city that was flattened to the ground after the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 and built itself back from the rubble. No matter how much you dig, Warsaw never runs out of history.

But this year, there are other reasons to visit Warsaw. Following a foodie revolution that has been quietly bubbling throughout the city since 2015, the capital has this year become one of Europe’s most exciting culinary and luxury hotspots, squaring up to its picturesque neighbour Kraków for tourist appeal with a spectacular spate of new hotel, bar and restaurant openings. From vegan markets to fine dining, basement cocktail dens to rooftop hideaways, Warsaw has flipped its image of dumplings and potato pancakes firmly upside down. 

Where to stay

Opening a new luxury hotel at the height of a global pandemic isn’t for the faint-hearted, but Warsaw’s brand new Nobu has pulled it off with a bang – the brand’s world-famous restaurant reeled in well-heeled crowds from the very first night of its 2020 summer opening for punchy ginger and jalapeno martinis served with plates of gooey black cod.

Located just outside Warsaw's Old Town, Nobu is the 12th hotel of Chef Nobu and Robert de Niro’s hotel empire, and is set to attract business travellers after a touch of luxury as well as discerning tourists drawn to the Nobu brand. Built inside the former 1920s Rialto hotel, one half of the building is firmly Art Deco, with original ornate furnishings from the former hotel scattered through every room and windows heaving with hanging manes of rusted red ivy, while the other is neat and minimalist, featuring Nobu’s trademark wood panelling, mirrored ceilings, concrete walls, brass flourishes and spherical wall lights. Local treats are ferried up to every room come teatime (from fruit crowns with whipped cream to panna cotta), while a record player is set up by the bed, with every room featuring a specially chosen record. Japanese and Polish cultures are intertwined throughout: in the cupboard, a Japanese tea set sits next to a bottle of Polish vodka, whie walls are dotted with modern Polish art from the Jankilevitsch Collection.

The hotel, with its tiny lobby, compact, utilitarian gym and fuss-free cafe, exists almost exclusively to showcase the restaurant. Poached from Nobu Barcelona is French Executive Chef Yannick Lohou, whose menu merges classic Japanese cuisine with local Polish touches to dazzling effect. On Thursdays, when the DJ slots into his spot in front of the curved glass walls, cleverly alluring any passerby with an inclination to party, you’ll find Lohou ambling smoothly around the room to observe his handiwork: delicate slivers of scallop doused in yuzu truffle, jalapeno smattered cauliflower and ever so tiny chicken wings powdered in miso. For breakfast, Covid has booted the buffet firmly out of the window, but a tightly curated menu of light local and Japanese favourites  – from scrambled eggs, cottage cheese with red radish to Matsuhisa Benedict, with dorset crab, shiso bearnaise and crispy tofu – means you don’t start the day with dreaded indigestion. 

After hours on Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, the hotel hosts a subterranean jazz club, Jassmine, for hotel guests and regular punters after a nightcap and a slice of Warsaw’s thriving music scene. Busking violinists, jazz troupes, soul singers and choirs are always dotted around the city’s Old Town – even the public benches play Chopin at the press of the button. 

Rooms from £168 per night; nobuhotels.com

In 1967, The Rolling Stones came to Eastern Europe – the first major Western band to cross the Iron Curtain – while touring their new album Between the Buttons. They played a legendary gig at Warsaw’s Palace of Science and Culture – a much-derided gift to the city from Stalin. The night after the first of two shows, the band and several hundred locals partied at a raucous bar in the Old Town, before continuing their celebrations down the road at one of the city’s most beautiful hotels: Hotel Europejski, a neo-Renaissance palace first opened in 1857 which has hosted everyone from Robert Kennedy to Marlene Dietrich and which came under the global Raffles banner with a significant refurbishment early last year. 

Now, the hotel is a spruced-up and sparkling homage to Polish art and design, with works from 120 local artists lining the lobby – from sculptor Rafał Dominik to Turner Prize nominee Goshka Macuga – of which the hotel’s Art Concierge offers guided tours. Regal and imposing, you’d never guess that in 1944, the hotel was almost all but destroyed during the Warsaw Uprising – with only the exterior still standing – despite surviving the Luftwaffe’s bombing in 1939. But the new designers repurposed some of the original hotel’s surviving features, including delicate rose detailing on the ceilings and a 1961 mosaic by Krystyna Kozłowska in the spa. Rooms are exquisite, with giant marbled bathrooms hosting freestanding bathtubs, sumptuous suede sofas in the suites and a desk looking out onto the bustling main square of the Old Town. But perhaps the real jewel to the Raffles crown is its much underrated patisserie – don't leave without a slice of carrot cake.

Rooms from £189 per night; raffles.com/warsaw

Where to eat

Bristol Cafe

By Daphne Bugler

By Owen Gough

Le Bristol – opened in 1901 and one of the few buildings to survive the war unscathed – is not only one of Warsaw’s most historic buildings but also one of its most coveted. Everyone from Elizabeth II and Margaret Thatcher to Naomi Campbell and Mick Jagger have stayed here, memorialised via the lobby's wheel of brass buttons each engraved with the name of a famous visitor. And most of them have dined at the Cafe Bristol, the hotel’s flagship restaurant known for its old-fashioned Viennese interiors and unique seasonal dishes including waffles with chanterelles mushrooms and berries. Adored, too, is the hotel's luxury scent – so much so that Rihanna apparently requested for it to be bottled as perfume for her to take home.

www.marriott.com

Hala Koszyki  

Poland’s first and only covered food market is a one minute jaunt down the road from Nobu Hotel, and offers everything from sushi to lamb burgers. It’s also stuffed with vegan eats – Warsaw was recently crowned the third most vegan-friendly city in the world – with falafel wraps and meat-free ramen, as well as a convincing take on Polish staple breaded pork, swapping meat for soy.

koszyki.com

Warsaw’s speciality sweet treat is the fresh doughnut made with rose jam, and at swanky chain Lukullus, the roses are rumoured to be the very same ones Chanel use to infuse their perfume Number 5. Come noon, stylish local punters pair their doughnuts with Lukullus' lethal espresso Martinis – lunch never tasted so good.

cukiernialukullus.pl

InAzia at the Sheraton Grand  

The best table at ultra-modern, high-end Asian fusion spot InAzia is the chef’s table, which, through a window, opens up into the kitchen and at which chef Marcin Sasin personally delivers delicate micro-portions of octopus and seaweed, and tuna with coriander and soya beans. Giving Heston Blumenthal a run for his money, the show stopping dessert takes the form of an entire unpeeled fruit – until a fork reveals it's all ice-cream.

restauracja-inazia.pl/

Where to drink

Bristol Perrier-Jouët champagne bar

First comes the clue in your coffee: a number printed in the foam. Then, a bottle-green envelope with a thickly embossed stamp bearing the outline of a dragonfly. Inside, an invitation with a password. If you’re lucky enough to receive such an invitation during the last course of lunch or dinner at the Bristol Cafe then you have an 'in' to the most exclusive bar in Warsaw. Converted from a former suite, this secret bar on the fourth floor of the Bristol hotel is simply magical. Once through the door (and don’t chance it, the password changes every day, even if you know the room number), a waiter escorts you onto a domed terrace, with banquettes fitted between four stone pillars, looking out over Warsaw’s Old Town. The only drink on the menu is champagne : but who’s complaining?

marriott.com

Charlie bar  

Squint at your Google Maps all you like, you won’t come any closer to finding this basement speakeasy unless you know what you’re looking for: a few white cafe tables and chairs outside a set of black double doors. Wind down the pitch-black staircase and you’ll find a cavernous space lined with creaking Chesterfields and battered wooden tables scattered with mint juleps in copper mugs and elegant champagne spritzes. Sit back and listen to some live jazz while impressing the bartender with your insider knowledge of Charlie’s secret cocktail menu. If he looks baffled, he’s bluffing.

charliebar.pl/

Quite possibly the shiniest – and tiniest – cocktail bar you’ll ever see, arriving at Aura (Latin for gold) gives you the distinct feeling of tumbling headfirst into a Moroccan souk. The terracotta-tiled walls slope into giant, blue archways and shelves of bottles only reachable via ladder. Almost every order from the brass and marble bar requires the bartender to begin a hair-raising ascent up the wall to pluck a bottle of bourbon – Aura’s speciality – from the wall. Beyond the signature bar’s Old Fashioned, GQ recommends the Plumtation (Tequila, Mezcal and red plum syrup) and the peach Negroni.

facebook.com/aurabourbonbar/

What to see 

The Royal Route

Most of the city’s historic sites are scattered across the Royal Route, which follows from the Royal Castle in the Old Town – where you can book charming Chopin concerts from some of the city’s brightest young musicians – along to Wilanow Palace (often referred to as the Polish Versailles). Along the way, stop for ice-cream at the Łazienki Palace, the largest park in Warsaw which homes a striking collection of peacocks and cheeky red squirrels, and, with the Vistula river running through it, is beautiful all year round. 

Warsaw Rising Museum

Dedicated to the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, this interactive museum is deeply moving and, at times, hard to stomach, with graphic film footage and unflinching photographs that document the starvation and eventual death that befell many inhabitants of Warsaw. That said, the uplifting through-line of the exhibition is the spirit of resilience and defiance that ultimately led to the city’s admirable regeneration. 

Fryderyk Chopin Museum  

It would be disrespectful to visit Warsaw without paying homage to the city’s most famous luminary, so spend a few hours in this beautiful museum’s listening booths, or admiring the last piano Chopin ever played.

muzeum.nifc.pl

Polish Vodka Museum

You can pretend you’re here for the history lesson, but really you’re here for the vodka – a liquor so dear to the Poles it's integral to their national heritage. After an interactive tasting, head up to the rooftop bar to try some of Warsaw’s best infused vodka cocktails, from salted caramel and apple to bread (yes, really), and chilli. 

muzeumpolskiejwodki.pl

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

Most visitors to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps – where 1.1 million men, women and children lost their lives during the Second World War – will do so while staying in Kraków, but it’s equally possible to see them from Warsaw within a day by train. As the memorial’s website puts so well, “There is no way to understand postwar Europe and the world without an in-depth confrontation between our idea of mankind and the remains of Auschwitz.”

auschwitz.org

With many thanks to the   Polish Tourism Association

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• Cast & crew
• Episode aired Oct 21, 2019

Richard Ayoade begins his final stint presenting the wry travel series in Dubrovnik with Stephen Merchant. The pair take a Game of Thrones (2011) tour, a buggy safari and a ferry across to t... Read all Richard Ayoade begins his final stint presenting the wry travel series in Dubrovnik with Stephen Merchant. The pair take a Game of Thrones (2011) tour, a buggy safari and a ferry across to the cursed island of Lokrum. Richard Ayoade begins his final stint presenting the wry travel series in Dubrovnik with Stephen Merchant. The pair take a Game of Thrones (2011) tour, a buggy safari and a ferry across to the cursed island of Lokrum.

• Nicola Silk
• Richard Ayoade
• Stephen Merchant

• Self - Presenter

• Self - Guest
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

Did you know

• Connections References Game of Thrones (2011)

User reviews

• October 21, 2019 (United Kingdom)
• United Kingdom
• Channel 4 (United Kingdom)
• Official Facebook
• North One Television
• Channel 4 Television
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

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• Runtime 24 minutes
• 1080i (HDTV)
• 576i (SDTV)

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