Culinary masterpiece in Atelier Amaro

Today, I’ll take you on a journey to a sophisticated, elegant and one-of-a-kind place, which is quite expensive but worth absolutely every penny you spend in there… And worth visiting at least once a year.  A perfect spot for a romantic dinner, as well as for eating out with a foreign visitor to Poland — let him/her see “that Poles are no Anserinae — they have a language of their own” (as our famous poet once said) but also that we have our fabulous chefs, who are artists and masters at the same time, and create places such as Atelier Amaro.

Atelier Amaro is located at ul. Agrykola 1, right next to Plac na Rozdrożu (Rozdroże Square) and has been operating since the end of 2011. Quite quickly the place was awarded the title of a Rising Star, in the prestigious Michelin Guide. The man behind the success of this restaurant and its main chef at the same time is Wojciech Modest Amaro, labelled as one of the most excellent Polish chefs, who learnt his skills from, among others, the famous Ferran Adria (El Bulli, Spain) and Rene Redzepi (Noma, Denmark). The motto he coined for his Atelier is “ where nature meets science”. We, as you know, are both professionally bound to the world of advertising, marketing and market research, so usually our reaction to all kinds of slogans and mottos is, let’s say, sceptical. Here, however, the motto is reflected in every single dish prepared with Polish ingredients in a totally surprising way. Well, because who would know how to make a green apple foam, blackcurrant paper or sauerkraut juice bread?! Only a magician!

When it comes to the menu, we don’t choose anything but just eat what the chef prepares on a given day. We can, however, decide on some things such us how hungry we are and how much money we wish to spend. Dinner comes in three options consisting of 3, 5 or 8 dishes (called „moments”) and described in a very enigmatic way, e.g. perch / kale / millet groats, or poppy seeds / chocolate / sea-buckthorn. Therefore we know more or less what ingredients to expect, yet we have no idea how the dish will look like. This time, for instance, a combination of ribs / Jerusalem artichoke / chokeberry turned out to be a… soup. What kind of soup? I’ll get to that in just a moment.

Now, the prices. Well, what can I say — it is expensive. But as I’ve mentioned at the very beginning, it’s also absolutely worth it. Of course it’s not a kind of place to go for dinner every day but only for some big occasions, and when we’re there I would recommend choosing 8 moments (for PLN 280) or 5 moments (PLN 220). Don’t go for 3 moments (PLN 145), as you’ll leave the restaurant hungry and feeling ripped off for no good reason. To the menu you can add a set of Polish slow food vodkas, which taste quite surprising and are made of even more surprising ingredients. I won’t tell you what ingredients as maybe you’ll have a chance to give it a go yourselves 🙂

What is also important is that the menu changes every month and depends to a large extent on the availability of seasonal products. In other words, when nature meets science is definitely NOT marketing bullshit 🙂

So, what did we have on Saturday? To be honest, in order to remember all the dishes you have to take notes during the dinner or ask for a detailed description of each thing you eat (like we did). There’s no way you can remember all the dishes otherwise! Anyway, before our dishes were served we were given three pre-starters…

and the third — definitely the most spectacular one: first, we were given small places with butter and vanilla salt and then the waiter brought steaming potatoes under a see-through lid. Inside, there were campfire baked potatoes and — pay attention now — dry twigs made of leek and mushroom! Quite a nice alternative to crisps I must say 😉 Very crunchy. And the whole thing was just divine!

After the starters we were hungry for more and waited impatiently for dishes to come. First, however, we got some bread made by the cooks of Atelier. If you’re following the blog or happen to eat with me from time to time than you’ll know that I love all kinds of home-baked delicacies.. of course not only in restaurants. Believe me, eating half of a baguette dipping it in olive oil is no problem for me 😉 Here I had to resist it a bit to leave some space for more to come. It wasn’t easy as the bread was delicious.

I was really waiting for the first “moment” described as cucumber / goat’s cheese / walnut as lately I goat’s cheese has been my favourite.

The salad was again delicious but I dare say it was the least surprising of everything we had that evening. Nevertheless, we smiled with awe seeing paper made of fennel and we really liked candied walnuts. It’s actually quite hard to describe their taste. Let me just tell you that it was different than what could be expected and that I could eat them every day.

Then it was time for trout / blackcurrant / cauliflower…

The trout didn’t blow me away but proso millet crackers, which tasted as a more sophisticated version of popcorn, and blackcurrant paper, which reminded me of summer flowers, were just amazing. The whole thing was simply like a breath of summer on a frosty day…

I have to say I was a little afraid of the next thing to come: ribs / Jerusalem artichoke / chokeberry. I’m not a big fan of ribs… We didn’t really know what “Jerusalem artichoke” was (Wikipedia just gave us a different name for it, which we weren’t familiar with either). So we just waited…

It looks beautiful, doesn’t it? Delicate, creamy and sweet soup with the rib somewhere at the bottom that, together with the chokeberry flavour, perfectly overcame the sweet taste, was very clear and nicely went with all the other ingredients.

… i.e. black radish and veal dumplings, beetroot dumplings with goat’s cheese and apricot stones butter (the best!) and pumpkin dumplings with betony and apple. All served with sour-rye soup made on sourdough and prunes. To sum up: the most delicate dumplings I have ever tasted and I think the best dish of the evening.

above you can see yet another masterpiece: sea-perch prepared sou vide (which, if I understood it correctly, means boiled in sealed plastic bag in water) in 46°C for about 10 minutes and then browned on butter (on the skin side). Served with millet groats, proso millet and savoy cabbage, as well as spring onion and sparassis crispa fungus. Under the fish there was green emulsion made of parsley and lemon beebrush and on top of it: kale and fish scale.  Woah! Have I really managed to describe it? 🙂 Was it good? The fish was amazing and so were the fungus. I liked the green emulsion less but maybe because I’m not particularly into vegetables and don’t like too much green stuff on my plate. That is also why I really loved the thing that came next, which didn’t have a lot to do with veggies…

Yes, you are not misled by the looks: this is Bamkuchen (also called layered cake) only it is made of… boletus. Next to it we have delicious sunflower and lingonberry risotto, venison tenderloin, a mushroom and on the top — a mini bun made of red cabbage juice stuffed with cabbage foam. Wow!

I am so full after this feast that I can’t even finish the mushroom as I still want to fit the dessert somewhere. Still, the tenderloin and risotto are just amazingly tasty and even now I can’t tell you which was my number one, this dish or the dumplings 🙂

If you know how much I love chocolate, you can guess how big my expectations regarding the poppy seed / sea-buckthorn /chocolate were… and the verdict was…?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I just died of delight! This was a top notch dessert delicacy. Slightly frozen pumpkin cheesecake, nice and crispy sprinkle (powder) and to go with that: thick, hot, perfect chocolate.  Oh, I forgot to mention the sea-buckthorn. Well, for me it was a bit too forest-like and I don’t like when something gets in the way of my chocolate perfectness, so I discreetly skipped it…  but it’s just me — a chocolate orthodox 😉 Łukasz swept away everything from his plate, only didn’t manage to scrape the place and left some chocolate on it (I mastered this ages ago :)), and then asked if I wanted to take it (the plate!) to the toilet and lick all that’s left… To be honest, for a moment I did consider this idea seriously 😉

For the very end we were served a nalewka and pine sprout tea… It was delicious and tasted very Chistmas-tree like. What can I say — everything was delicious. I am already sooo looking forward to our next visit in Atelier Amaro. But I’ll have to wait quite a while as I’m planning to come back here in July, with my guest from New York and Washington. Hell yes! Let her know what kind of places are opening in Warsaw! After the top notch culinary masterpiece I just experienced, the only thing I can say is “Bravo! Encore, encore!” 🙂