Pod Lososiem review

After a few weeks of not visiting traditional Polish restaurants, we decided it was time to get back on the saddle and try again. We wanted it to be good. We really did.

Pod Lososiem is regarded as one of the best restaurants in Gdansk. Famous people go there – Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, various central European and Eastern European presidents. It’s one of the most expensive.

And on entry to the restaurant, it felt expensive. Three members of staff were standing on our arrival in a hallway lined with old paintings in gilt frames. One guy took us up a small stairway to the cloakroom and we exchanged coats for tokens. I thought this was strange… usually coats are taken from us at the start and magically returned at the end.. but then I saw a tip tray and it all made sense. Money for putting our coats on a rack and giving us a token? Seriously?

We were led to our table in a beautiful old room. Tastefully decorated with dark wood furniture and oil paintings, softly lit by concealed lights and candles, the room was cosy and it didn’t matter that we were the only guests for half an hour.

The menu was varied and we had difficulty narrowing down the choices. To start with we went for liver with caramelised apples and calvados, crayfish soup.

As we waited, we were treated to 3 slices of bread straight from a sliced loaf from a supermarket and butter that was so hard we considered warming it over the candles! The bread was obviously sitting out for a while so we didn’t bother but it still cost 4PLN which came as a surprise on the bill at the end.

The liver was the most tender I’ve had and went well with the apples. It was so good I got excited about my main course. The soup was rich and tasted like it was made from a proper crayfish stock with lots of crayfish tails added at the end. It was ‘what it said on the tin’. Unlike the mains.

My “golden salmon on flan of carrots and broccolli, baking potatoes with thyme” was actually a shot of goldwasser liquer with well seasoned but overcooked salmon, boiled carrots (no flan), no broccolli, a dry potato and courgette gratin and wait for it… moussaka which was lukewarm on top and stone cold underneath…

It is also worth noting here that the restaurant’s name ‘Lososiem’ is a reference to salmon and the restaurant is ‘renowned’ for its salmon dishes, and yet the fish was dreadfully overcooked.

The “back of deer with rosemary with boletus mushrooms and grilled vegetables” was back of deer with mushroom sauce (perfectly cooked and pink with a creamy mushroom sauce) boiled carrots, potato gratin and cold moussaka. Deja vu?

It was so bad it was funny. Laugh out loud funny. It felt like they were trying to palm off the leftovers from lunch rather than spending a few pence going to the local market and picking up some broccoli. Finding the exact same sides on salmon and game meat just screams time saving and cost saving laziness.

The dessert menu was fairly sparse, with the usual suspects and nothing creative – hot cherries with icecream and creme brulee. We shared a creme brulee at the end as the waiter recommended it and we thought it would somehow end the experience on a better note than if we left straight after the mains. But it was barely average. Good brulee topping, but the underneath custard was just too cold.

We left the restaurant, taking time to look at the photos of the famous people on the way out and we realised they were mostly out-of-towners… rather like all the other diners we overheard that night. Not a good sign when locals don’t dine at “one of the best restaurants in town”.

Pod Lososiem has now prompted us to break from our simple star rating of old and to split our restaurant ratings to sub categories – the service was excellent, our waiter was very attentive, and the decor was a welcome change to ultra modern or fake and tacky old… but the food was simply poor.

Food
Service
Decor
Value

Restauracja Pod Lososiem
220 PLN (£45) for two excluding wine
Gdansk
ul.Szeroka 52-54