POLONIA
On 28 May 2007. Dim and I went to a Polish restaurant in a place called Great Bridge, near West Bromwich.
We have never eaten Polish food, and I got curious when I read good reviews about this newly opened restaurant. Since last year, a lot of new immigrants have been coming from Poland and my impression is that this restraunt is mainly targeting on them.
It is situated in a difficult place to find: address is 15a Market Place, but it does not face Market Place, and you have to go through an alley next to a tool shop called Hughes & Holmes. From outside, it looks more like a storehouse than a restaurant.
Inside, however, it is another world: it is cosy and elegant. Only distraction is the large flat screens on the wall with Polish MTV style programme on.
The waitng staff was polite and pleasant. The clients were a half Polish and a half English when we visited.
An interesting thing about this place was that you could know how much grammes of food you would be served from the menu, as you see on the photo. I heard that in some countries, it is obligatory by law that restaurants inform the clients how much grammes of meat are to be served. Maybe Poland has such a regulation.
This is one of the starters: beetroot bouillon with Polish ravioli. The soup was sour and had a smoky flavour. Ravioli in themselves were not big deal, but they went well with the soup. Dim does not usually like soup, but when I gave him the bowl to test it, he finished it without leaving me anything.
The other starter: herring with cream. One fillet of raw salted herring, and raw onion slices mixed with heavy sour cream. I love raw blue fish and I have bought it several times from Polish grocery, but this one was far too salty. We were also served several slices of Polish bread, but they disappeared quickly to finish this salty fish.
These are the main dishes. Mine was a potato pancake in Hungarian style and Dim's was bigos (mixed meat with sauerkraut). They were both presented beautifully. Potato pancake was green, and folded in the middle to wrap meat (I think it was chicken) stew with paprika pepper pieces. On top of it was cheese. I did not like it so much, as the meat was cooked too long, resulting in the consistency of airplane meal meat, and most of all, it was too salty.Bigos was various bits of sausages and hams cooked with sauerkraut, that came with chips that Dim asked as side dish (included in the price of main dish). It was, again, too salty.
We had also a mixed salad as side dish. It turned out to be assorted pickled vegetable. I love pickles, but on that occasion I really wished it were normal fresh salad so that I could escape from the saltiness of the main dishes.
The price for all these, with 1 bottle of beer came ca. £18. So it was very good value for two two-course meals. Even so, I would never return as I cannot stand such salty food.
Refer this site for the address and phone http://www.birminghamplus.com/items/items.asp?iid=2506
