Description: We had heard that the Kazimierz district was a good place to find unusual and excellent restaurants in Krakow. As we always try to find a restaurant off the usual tourist track (as they have to make more effort to get diners through the door), we decided to take a trek down to Kazimierz one evening.
Kazimierz was home to the old Jewish quarter. After the war, only around 6,000 Krakow Jews has survived (the pre-war population was around 65,000). Almost left to wrack and ruin, the area was only restored after the collapse of the iron curtain, when surviving relatives could claim the old family home. Today, the place is a strange mix of restored and dilapidated, but it is a lively place to wander.
As it was sleeting, we didn’t want to walk any longer then strictly necessary, and so found the Cosa Nostra on the edge of Kazimierz, on Ul Dajwor, almost opposite the Galica Jewish Museum. As you might expect from the name, the Cosa Nostra specialise in Italian dishes.
From the outside, the place certainly looked promising; a well-maintained building set right onto the street. Inside, the restaurant was clean and tidy, and invitingly painted in a cheerful peach. An English-speaking server greeted us. We put the sluggish number of diners down to the weather, the slightly out-of-the-way location, and the mid-week in January. The restaurant has a ground floor and basement, together with smoking and non-smoking sections. Our table was next to a wall-pained fresco of Italian scenery.
While the food was OK, I was disappointed that the Cosa Nostra didn’t serve us what was described on the menu. For starters, we decided to share a couple of garlic breads (described as focaccia). Rather than receive the risen flat bread I expected, we had some dry and burnt garlic and rosemary on flat and almost unleavened bread. I found the starter very dry, and not particularly enjoyable. Even a little oil added to the topping would have helped.
Thankfully, we had also ordered a couple of salads, whose moisture enabled me to finish a couple of pieces of the garlic bread. My salad was the rather fancy, tuna, quails eggs and chickpea salad. It was very nice, although it didn’t actually contain chickpeas! The haricot beans were fine, but again, we weren’t served what we had expected.
For my main course, I ordered an Etna pizza, which was very large and fairly tasty. While it contained the red chillies and anchovies that was described, it lacked the salami. My beloved’s sun dried tomato certainly lived up to expectation, although like mine, the pizza base wasn’t the tastiest. Our dining companions tiger prawn dish was considerably oversold, being of the small and cheap prawn variety, rather than the juicy tiger prawn version described. It was more of a pussycat.
The wine was a more reasonable deal, being flavoursome and reasonably priced.
One of the stranger aspects to the Cosa Nostra is that the ground floor toilet leads directly into the restaurant (I am more used to there being some kind of alcove, and two doors between toilet and diners). I found it quite disconcerting to urinate, with the voices of happy diners chatting just through the door.
In all, our meal came to just over £40 ($80) for four, so it wasn’t an unmitigated disaster. However, while the food wasn’t terrible, I would much prefer to dine in a place that has a better attention to detail. After we left the restaurant, we wandered around Kazimierz a little more, and found a number of promising looking places within 200 yards of the Cosa Nostra. Given the sheer number of similar priced restaurants to choose from, I can’t recommend the Cosa Nostra. Do yourself a favour and hunt down somewhere else!
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