Wilder Osten

Review

Poland to go

Let's put it this way: it's about time. In the Beisl and Grätzel reports of the past few weeks, highly motivated young women from Poland who are great cooks or bakers in Vienna have somehow appeared more and more often. Aleksandra Szwarc at the new brösl, for example, or Anna Idzik with her fantastic Peti Pari patisserie. And since mid-September, there has finally been a small store on Vorgartenmarkt, where you can get some great Polish specialties as well as a bit of cooking - since last week also to take away. The supply of Polish food in Vienna can be considered to be guaranteed throughout, a Polish supermarket can soon be found, "but there are almost only industrial goods," Joanna Janas concedes. And she and her two colleagues are not interested in industrial goods. Ms. Janas comes from Poznan and used to earn her money by designing gingerbread, which she then had reproduced by small manufacturers in Slovakia and sold at Christmas markets in Schönbrunn or on Maria-Theresien-Platz. It is important to her to be a small-scale business and to work with small-scale businesses whose quality goes beyond traditional trade standards and who are often too small to afford organic certification on the one hand and to invest in marketing on the other. The shelves in the store called Wilder Osten are full of such products, both from Austria and from Poland and Slovakia. Polish jams and fermented vegetables, Polish acorn and chicory coffee, dried red-capped mushrooms from Polish forests, teas made from Polish wild herbs. Or jams made from different types of cherries from Burgenland. Awesome. And the highlight of the range: around 20 Polish cheeses, mostly made from goat's and sheep's milk, very wild and very good, artisanal stuff, lots of flavor.
Polish food is also cooked and baked daily on a stove behind the Budel, such as a very good organic chicken soup with root vegetables and wafer-thin durum wheat semolina noodles, to take away in a jar (€ 4.90), or a fluffy pumpkin, polenta and millet casserole with beetroot and potato salad and "Ruthenian sauce", a salad of pickled cucumbers with cream sauce (€ 7.90). Joanna Janas explains that the Polish soups, such as the pickled cucumber soup, are truly unique, even if they are not very Instagrammable, and even if meat is not really the focus of the Wild East women, sometimes it can also be bigos with original Polish sausages from small manufacturers. Hooray! And Polish fruit wine is also available before Christmas. To sum up: good food from small businesses in Poland and Austria as well as a few Polish dishes that are hard to find anywhere else in Vienna. Wilder Osten, 2nd, Vorgartenmarkt 31, tel. 01/942 75 96, Mon-Sat 8am-6pm,

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