Just in time for summer

In times of sky-rocketing real estate prices, it can be extremely pleasing to discover that your living space has suddenly grown overnight.

Especially if the extension comes with a cascading fountain, swathes of wildflowers, and a newly restored synagogue as the extravagant detail.

..NOT BAD!

When you're one of the Warsaw non-natives with minimal chances of acquiring any scrap of real estate in the city within your lifetime, you really have three options:

a. Pretend you're a long-lost heir to one of the many disputed plots of land in the city centre where a townhouse stood before the war. Next, wait 86973 years and you just might get it back.

b. Set up camp with the hobos in Las Kabacki.

c. Take out a bank loan of 500,000PLN. Pay back twice as much, and in 40 years you will be a proud lord at your very own 60m2 mansion!

d. Screw it all, stick to your rental, and come to love the city so that it begins to feel like one big extension of your living room. Wandering the streets, seeing them change, is owning them. Just like in a giant game of Monopoly.

I have yet to try the first three, but d. has been working fine for me so far. The perks are multiple, including the fact that all maintenance and renovation is done - and paid for - by somebody else.

So that places like this:

can be turned into something like this. Solely for your viewing pleasure:

(c) gazeta.pl

NICE! Thanks, Warsaw!

The name of this recently refurbished corner of the city is Plac Grzybowski. Surrounded by towering corporate fortresses, it's an earthy enclave, constructed out of wood, granite, trickling water, lots and lots and lots of wildflowers, and benches on rails that can be moved from one end of the square to the other. Get this: you can move furniture around as you like. What else do you need to feel more at home?

This kind of environment fosters growth of little quaint cafes, just as the forest floor fosters the springing up of mushrooms in autumn. And sure enough, as we wandered into this area for the first time in a long while, the first door we stumbled upon was this:

Two cosily worn-out armchairs and the word Cafe above them.. cue myself & my coffee-starved husband!

Cafe Na Placu is the cafe your favourite granny would open if she knew about organic foods and was worldly enough to know of exotic drinks such as cider (strange how little known cider is in a country that counts apples as its most widely grown fruit). They stock the Savanna Dry cider from South Africa that I remember from Holland, which at 15PLN per bottle is an exotic treat... but so worth it!). They also have a few local brews, and a daily selection of cakes and desserts.

Lattes (9PLN) are hearty and frothy, and espresso (8PLN, double 11PLN) is pleasant even on the demanding palate that I have married.

You can sit outside, or pick your favourite chair in the granny lounge. There's plenty of board games to choose from and stacks of magazines, too.

I was intrigued by what resembled a maturing wheel of cheese with orange peel and turned out to be Pascha, a traditional - but now sadly forgotten - Easter dessert, which, as Wikipedia puts it, combines "those foods that are fobidden during Lent". After tasting it, I can confirm that it's a proper Lent rebound, with each small triangular slice containing something around a bucket of cream and six sticks of butter. But it's better not to know it, for Pascha is a delicious treat, more delicate than any cheesecake and richer than ice-cream. No wonder that in these days of cholesterol terror, housewives have had to bump it off their Easter menu.

See you, Na Placu Cafe! I hope next time we see each other, you will have gotten yourself a nice fat cafe cat.

Na Placu Cafe

Plac Grzybowski 2, Warsaw

Ambience: 4.5/5 beans

Coffee: 4/5 beans

A Sip of Something Else

Every Saturday morning, as we sit down to breakfast, G and I get carried away and spin a story of what a glorious life we would live if only we could move out of Warsaw to a small town. Slow mornings, your own little yard of herbs, and an apple orchard, friendly shop owners, little vegetable stalls at the marketplace, merry plump-cheeked neighbours waving good morning.

Yes, our idyllic tale always has all those necessary ingredients, and in our little fantasy world everyone living in the middle of nowhere has a job that makes them flush with excitement, cows and horses never poop in the street, and market grannies never try to screw you over when selling their agricultural produce. But, it is very easy to be seduced by a beautiful vision like this when your local grocery store is a giant Real supermarket, where a plain quest for a baguette takes you through a maze of mayonnaise stacks, discounted boy shorts, and, around this season, jingling reindeer and farting Santa figures.

Thus, G and I decided to stray away from this messy chaos, and look for some more local experience somwhere not too far from where we live (if it was to be local in the real sense of the word!). And what better place to stray into than a lovely little street two metro stops uptown from us called Meander Street? We walked up and down the specialty shop-lined pedestrian lane, quite astounded to have found a place like this in our very own district. As we strolled in, they were just putting up strings of Christmas lights between the street lamps. There is a lovely fruit and vegetable shop, a wine shop, a pet shop, a watchmaker's, second-hand boutiques, and at least three butcher's. And amidst all this sits a place whose name very aptly summed up everything that it was for us on that day.

Lyk Optymizmu, or A Sip of Optimism, is a tiny cafe of no more than 5 tables. As you head towards it, on a cold winter day, the bustling street around it will make you feel like you have just entered Dickens' Christmas Carol, and the feeling is suddenly amplified once you step inside the place. D-Ding!, goes the bell above the door, and you immediately warm towards the place.

Whitewashed walls, warmly lit cabinets crowded with cups, coffee jars and tea cans, and an invitingly long counter, at which you will always see locals inquiring after the cafe's apparently famous homemade cakes. On the day we visited, they just began taking in orders for Christmas cakes and cookies, and a bunch of grannies were sitting flustered over a list of possible options. If you get lucky, you might even spot a very glad little girl watching her favourite Scooby-Doo episode on a portable DVD player. We had that luck!

We took a long while at the right-most section of the counter, which displays the fresh baked produce of the cafe. The cakes of the day included, among others, hot apple crumble, traditional cheesecake, and a layered jellycake. After some deliberation, we opted for a chocolate crumble-topped cheesecake and a banana cheesecake, accompanied by our usual set of double espresso and latte.

Yum! I don't think I can possibly tell you how delicious the banana cream cake was. It is light and fluffy, not too sweet, and generously sprinkled with white and milk chocolate shavings. And all this for an incredible price of 5 PLN (1.10 EUR), a price unthinkable in any of the coffee chains in the city centre. Only a few cakes on the menu at Lyk Optymizmu cost more than this, so you will find it hard not to order any sweet accompaniment to your coffee main course. My latte (6 PLN) was fluffy & delicious, and G gave definite thumbs up to his double espresso (9 PLN).

The little star-shaped cookies you can see beside the drinks are a staple of the place. There is always a full basket of these homemade delights just beside the cash register, and they are priced at only 1 PLN (0.25 EUR). If G and I ever have the luck of running our very own cafe, I will make it one of my priorities to add such a lovely treat to every coffee free of charge. They're easy to make and taste wonderful, but most importantly, there is something about their shape and size that makes you feel all cosy and at home. Isn't it funny how one little cookie can determine your impression of the place? I certainly know that we will be spending more Saturday mornings over those crunchy bits of homely spirit. Yum!

Lyk Optymizmu
Belgradzka 46/10
Natolin, Warsaw

Coffee: 4 beans
Ambience: 5 beans
OVERALL: 4.5 beans / 5