Warsaw. Hub.Praga restaurant
Hub.Praga is a new restaurant opened just three months ago in Warsaw by a renowned chef Witek Iwański, who you may remember from Aruana. It has a short, rotating card. You can pop in for a tasting menu which consists of all of the dishes in the card without making a reservation and sommelier Grzegorz Koczela will help you select some great wine to complement the dinner.
Grzegorz started his career in Cracow, but the last 3 years he has spent in Warsaw. He worked with Piotr Pietras MS on opening Forty Mokotow restaurant, and then worked for a year in Epoka run by Marcin Przybysz. He said it was an interesting experience when it comes to the wine pairing, which as it turns out is not that simple and textbook with such multi-ingredient dishes as Marcin serves, where one ingredient changes the whole concept of pairing.
At Hub.Praga Grzegorz was given the opportunity to create his own wine list. Wines complement the menu, which changes very quickly - since March already 5 times! Dishes rotate due to seasonality of products, currently you can try asparagus and pike-perch. The wine labels are also rotating to adapt to the changing dishes and the season, it’s boutique and has about 50 positions.
Grzegorz is not attached to any wine, as far as the style of the card is concerned he wants to go in rather unobvious directions, and even if there is a familiar one it may be an atypical grape variety. From Côtes du Jura he doesn’t suggests Pinot but Trousseau, from Burgundy an unusual and more affordable Gamay from Perroud Brouilly, you will also be surprised by Garnacha Blanca from Spain. In Hub.Praga you will also find wines from our region - Slovenia, Hungary, Czech Republic or Poland, which are strongly emphasized in the card. The leading sparkling wine in the card is Polish Smolis Brut Nature made with the traditional method, produced in Brzeziny near Lodz, where on 1.5 h of land grows Seyval Blanc, Chardonnay and Pinot Munier.
During the dinner, I had the opportunity to try Boeckel Wiebelsberg Grand Cru Riesling 2017 for 195 PLN and Peter Setét's Furmint 2013 for 165 PLN. Boeckel had a beautiful balance, very ripe wine with high acidity that still has at least 5 years ahead of it. Peter Setét’s Furmint is an unorthodox, semi-dry wine that you don’t feel due to its high, but well-balanced acidity. It has lots of barrel, smoky and honey notes typical for Furmints. The Mives Borhaz winery and its owner Peter Setét are enigmatic to say the least, but already a star producer in Hungary. The wine comes to Poland only with a counter label, because Rymarczyk & Białobrocki Imports didn’t quite like the original one and asked Stanislaw Wejman, an artist from Cracow to lend them graphics of pumpkins he prepared for the 60th anniversary of his work. It's difficult to see a pumpkin on the label, it looked more like a moon or a 1990s broadcast break.
We tried every dish on the menu. It is small, fits what guests can eat during one evening, and is very flexible - you can order the tasting menu which has all the dishes on the menu in smaller portions, or order à la carte, 3-5 dishes per person are recommended. The idea is for guests to play with the food, try a few dishes and come back to what they liked the most, as we did. The restaurant has been open only for 3 months, but most guests enjoy the concept and lack of classic division in the menu. You also don’t need to make a reservation for the tasting menu in advance, you can make all these decisions on the spot. Due to the fact that the card is small, it changes quite often, so when guests return they can try something new. Since the opening, practically the whole card has already changed, one dish after another.
Food should be nice, aesthetic and tasty! You will not find any excess of form over substance here. Pandemic forced more cooking at home and the general level of culinary has risen, so expectations are also higher when we visit a restaurant, where we want to eat something that we would not prepare at home. A visit to the restaurant has to be an experience, so in Witek's dishes, you will find small surprising elements such as soda sugar exploding pleasantly on the tongue, something most of us remember from our childhood. Simple, but very tasty, the chef refers a little to the classics in the kitchen. Witek respects Polish products and uses a lot of them, but he also reaches for other products if he finds them interesting. The whole menu can be eaten in 2 hours or even faster, depending on you.
Surf and turf is a combination of land, sea and a play on words. The sea is represented by the oyster and the land by the “chicken oyster”. The play on words refers to the small muscles on the chicken’s back, which by their texture, shape and tenderness resemble oysters hence the English name "chicken oyster". They are served in butter on tartar sauce, which is based on fresh oysters, hence the shells on the plate and the form of serving as if you were eating real oysters.
Asparagus - this is the second edition of white asparagus in the menu, now they are lightly spread with yogurt cream, sprinkled with sourdough bread, crispy onions and Parmesan cheese. Served with a mousseline sauce that is a combination of hollandaise sauce and whipped cream. The form of serving encourages guests to catch the asparagus with their hands and dip in the sauce. So far, it has been on the menu for 3 days and gets positive reviews.
Beetroot salad is an answer to the demand for spring soup “chłodnik”. Young, cooked beets, marinated in hazelnut vinaigrette and served on top with hazelnut cookies, with a delicate flan made of a mixture of eggs and cream, and the cream itself is flavoured with lemongrass and ginger. This is topped with beet syrup and a warm sauce of beet, miso, sherry vinegar and brown butter. Bread is recommended for this dish because there is a butter sauce and lots of intense flavours, so it's good to scoop bread across the bottom of the plate.
Bread is a separate item on the menu, as the kitchen puts as much work into it as all the other dishes. It's served with butter, which they also put a lot of work into.
Vegetable casserole is inspired by a very classic and simple French dish. Here we have a dry shortcrust pastry with a béchamel sauce made more like a crème patisserie and lots of young and old vegetables, grilled and raw, all tied together by butter and lovage. This dish changes with the seasonal vegetables.
Beef tartare is a response to guests’ requests. When Hub.Praga opened, it wasn't on the menu, but many guests were asking for it, so it finally appeared on the menu. It's served with perilla, part of which is fried and part marinated, so we have different textures and flavours, some crunchy and some sour. A beef heart is also a non-obvious addition, as Witek tries to emphasize that tartar is practically the whole animal and you have to think about what happens with the rest of its less popular parts. So we have a beef heart that has been marinated, dried and grated on top of this dish, topped with wild garlic and dry waffles with a bit of creamy yolk. Witek encourages guests to put the tartare on the top of the waffle and eat it as a sandwich, and then have a bit of a pickled Mirabelle plum at the end.
Sautéed celery - the only dish on the menu that has been there from the very beginning. Celery is roasted the way you roast meat, at a specific temperature, then it is sliced, marinated, breaded and fried. On top are mushrooms, which are glazed with mushroom garum. Lots of intense flavor and umami, a touch of sheep's milk cheese. To use every element of celery for this dish a very delicate celery cream soup or even veloute is served with a little bit of brown butter to accompany the dish.
Three main courses:
Ravioli includes two types of artichokes - hearts and Jerusalem artichokes and this again is a play on words as the name of this vegetable in Polish is “topinambur”. The sauce is based on the “grilled butter” which is flavoured with hot coals. The dish is highly praised by guests.
Pikeperch comes from the area of Śniardwy, it has excellent white meat and few bones. Each fish weighs around 3-4 kg and is seasoned in the restaurant for about 4-5 days. Fillets grilled on the yakitori grill and served on top of a delicate salad made of the meat from the head, cheeks, flanks, and tails recovered after filleting with Beurre Blanc sauce based on fish broth. It’s accompanied by green peas, green asparagus, an emulsion of wild garlic and is seasoned with sorrel leaf.
Veal - there are several veal elements on the plate - grilled pork loin, veal sauce, Italian cabbage with horseradish served on a terrine of brisket and veal legs, with green pistachio and a French mushroom pastry served in the form of a very classic viennoiserie that you might associate with sweet pastries. This goes great with the veal sauce and the veal fat that is added during baking.
Strawberry dessert - strawberries are very strongly rooted in Polish cuisine, and everyone has some memories associated with them. Strawberries are lightly marinated in elderberry vinegar, topped with sorrel and strawberry sorbet, fresh elderflowers and meringue.
Buttermilk dessert - a signature dessert made with butter, served in the same form as fresh butter is usually served in restaurants, i.e. on an evenly wiped plate with a pinch of salt on top. The dessert also contains walnuts, hazelnuts and salted caramel seasoned with spirit vinegar, which breaks the flavour a bit.
Cookies - Witek wanted to have cookies on the menu from the beginning, for those who don't really want to eat desserts, but would like to have something small with their coffee.
Polish cheeses - Tuleżak made as Italian Taleggio cheese, it is a cow cheese, sheep cheese from a Good Shepherd, mirabelle jam and home-made crackers.
An absolute must-visit when in Warsaw! Surf and turf, tartare, sautéed celery, and pikeperch stole the show for us, but as the menu changes with seasonal products, you will have the chance to try new dishes, which I’m sure will love!