Bottiglieria 1881
Entire kitchen area at Bottiglieria 1881
Bottiglieria 1881 review at-a-glance
Awards: One Michelin Star
+The Chef’s unique background comes through clearly in the food.
+Food and wine lists represent good value for the money.
Verdict: Bottiglieria is a unique restaurant but not because it is the only Michelin star restaurant in Krakow (which it is). It is unique because it showcases what happens when you take Chef Przemysław Klima's background at New Nordic and French restaurants and apply it to local Polish ingredients. I only spent a few days in Poland but I can’t imagine there is another restaurant with this unique blend of culture and technique. That’s reason enough to visit but fortunately, the food also happens to taste good too. Priced about 50% less than my Western European standards, Chef Klima’s cooking strikes a delicate balance between being interesting without being abstract.
Rating: 89/100
Would I revisit: Yes
Price I Paid: 360 PLN / €80 for the longest 7-course tasting menu
Value: 17/20
Bottiglieria 1881 Background
Bottiglieria 1881 is one of only two restaurants in Poland currently holding a Michelin star, putting it at the forefront of the country's gastronomic scene. Despite the lofty accolades, it is a humble restaurant. Where many Michelin restaurants have huge state-of-the-art kitchens, I am not sure the chefs at Bottiglieria have more space than I do in my home set-up. The kitchen team is even smaller than the kitchen, featuring only three chefs - Head Chef Przemysław Klima and his two sous chefs, Paweł Kras and Jakub Kojder. This small team can’t be great for their work-life balance but the pressure cooker of working in such tight confines in a close-knit team must do wonders for the creative process.
While some dishes worked for me more than others, I unequivocally loved Chef Kilma’s style of cooking. He previously worked at two of the heavy hitters of the New Nordic movement (Kadeau and Noma) and seems to have taken the best parts of that style of cooking without picking up any of its bad habits (lip-puckering acidity, kitchens more concerned with being clever than producing tasty food). While the food leaned towards New Nordic in style, it incorporated local Polish ingredients and flavors while also borrowing some classic techniques from the French. This reminded me a bit of Ana Ros’s cooking at Hiša Franko. Not so much in flavor, but in the way that you are eating something wholly original based on the chef’s unique blend of culture, background, and experiences.
Bottiglieria 1881 offers a la carte during the week (starters ~70-80 PLN, mains 80-170 PLN, dessert 50-70 PLN) but is a tasting menu only affair on the weekend with a 5-course menu at 290 PLN / €60 and the 7-course menu at 360 PLN / €80. Regardless of when you visit, I would recommend going for the tasting menu as Chef Klima’s food seems particularly well suited to the tasting menu format. There was a decent list of wines by the glass that covered a diverse set of regions and wines rather than focusing on the more classic French or Italian regions.
Service was attentive and friendly throughout, striking the right balance between formality and having a good time. My wife thought the service was particularly good as of the many Michelin restaurants she has been to, this was the first that offered to change the heat just for her when they saw her wearing her jacket. I also dropped my lens cap and they thought the noise was a stray fork falling and brought us a clean set post haste. This is the kind of attentiveness you can expect at Bottiglieria 1881.
The dining room was slick with lots of wood and no white tablecloths in sight. My only complaint was the tables were a tad small relative to how much they had to fit (centerpiece, menu, bread, etc.) but this was a concession to the small size of the restaurant.
What I ate at Bottiglieria 1881
The nibbles to start the meal included some mangalica pork paired with paprika and potato as well as salad with gooseberry and shaved egg yolk. Two good bites to start that followed a logical progression with the salad refreshing the palate after the fatty pork.
The first dish of the meal was excellent beef tartar with tarragon, cucumber, and parsley cream. I have really taken to beef tartar while living in Europe and this was an excellent rendition of the bistro classic. It is hard to fault much in this dish, the flavors nice and refreshing with the beef texture very good and the parsley cream, in particular, being a wonder. If I was to nitpick, my only feedback would be the cucumber could have used a tad more vinegar to pack in more acitidy.
The second course was mackerel with kohlrabi and sorrel. Mackerel is always a tough fish for me - I love it in sushi when it is traditionally paired with strong ginger but find it to be more of a mixed bag when it is included in a composed dish. Unfortunately, this dish skewed to the bad end of that mixed bag. While it was clear that a lot of skill and effort went into the plate, the taste of the mackerel was too strong and the broth didn’t quite have as much zip as I had hoped. The highlight of the dish was actually the kohlrabi which provided plenty of tart crispness.
Next up was a dish of painstakingly plucked crayfish meat with tomato, caviar, and a vegetable consomme. I found this to be a fascinating dish that actually reminded me quite a bit of a langoustine dish at three star Seehotel Uberfahrt where a plump langoustine was served with a tea broth simmered tableside. Compared to the Uberfahrt version, the broth at Bottiglieria 1881 was clearly better - it was actually shocking how much flavor the chef was able to coax out of a humble vegetable broth. Where Chef Klima could learn from Uberfahrt’s dish was the ratio of meat to broth - I found the delicate crayfish meat (and the caviar) got a bit lost with the amount of broth. Uberfahrt solved this issue by using the meatier langoustine and pouring much less broth. Nonetheless, in a dish like this, broth is the most important factor so I preferred Bottiglieria 1881’s version to Uberfahrt.
While I was lukewarm on the crayfish and mackerel, the kitchen got on a bit of a hot steak starting with the next dish and continuing through the rest of the meal. First up was perogies stuffed with polish mountain cheese and served with a morels reduction. My wife found this too rich but I was in heaven. The perogies had a nice toothsome texture and the morel reduction was deeply flavorful with just a touch of sweetness and acidity to cut through all that richness. A great interpretation of a classic Polish dish. As an aside, perogies were somewhat hilariously translated to dumplings on the English menu as if English speakers would not know what perogies are After the rich perogies, the kitchen sent out a palate cleanser of sorts with a small shot of kombucha with ginger cream (no picture). I am not a huge kombucha fan but this certainly did the job of clearing the palate before the main courses.
To me, the main fish course of halibut, white asparagus veloute and peas was the purest expression of the Chef’s approach to food with its perfect merger of classic French technique and new nordic ethos. White asparagus was the star, cleverly transformed into a veloute that had all the richness of a more traditional version of the French mother sauce while somehow feeling lighter due to the use of the asparagus. A nice moist piece of halibut was a great vehicle to transport the inspired sauce and create an altogether remarkable fish course. Everything was rounded out with some top-quality peas.
The main meat, lamb with wild garlic and anchovies, was almost as good as the fish. While I didn’t enjoy the plating style (not a fan of just covering the entire dish with a leaf), the flavors more than made up for the presentation. Top-quality lamb, maybe a shade below what you would find in northern Germany/Denmark but excellent nonetheless. Cooked to a nice rosy red, the meat was juicy and had a nice pronounced gaminess without being off-putting. Given lamb is a strong flavor, using the anchovies to build a sauce was smart as they brought both saltiness and their own unique flavor to the party. Served on the side were mini sausages made from the lamb and topped with caramelized onions and a smokey sauce. I will never say no to sausage and this version had plenty of flavor with a good smokiness coming through. An excellent finish to the savory part of the menu.
New nordic chefs often veer off course with the desserts, eschewing any semblance of taste for cleverness and an obsession with making vegetables taste passable in desserts instead of making more traditional ingredients taste great. I am happy to say the pastry section at Bottiglieria 1881 did none of that, striking a nice balance between adding a little intrigue to their desserts while also not forgetting that they should taste like, well….dessert.
The first sweet was really two separate but interconnected plates - a dish filled with a raspberry sorbet topped with bits of frozen raspberries and then a small cone filled with lavender cream. The two different dishes provided a really nice composition - first, you get the raspberry sorbet, cold with plenty of bright acidity and pure raspberry flavor. Next, you get the lavender cone with plenty of floral flavors and a consistency similar to the filling of cannoli. Overall, a very enjoyable dessert.
Even better was a dessert of rhubarb with strawberry and goat cheese ice cream. Ignoring again the plating where the entire dish is covered by one component, this was a delicious dessert. Perhaps this isn’t the most remarkable of flavor profiles (it essentially tasted like a strawberry-rhubarb cheesecake) but when it tastes this good who cares? I happily devoured the entire bowl and most of my wife’s who was too full at this point. Sometimes simple, straightforward flavors get the best results. This was one of those times.