These Chefs Are Showing Manchester There's More to Polish Food Than Pierogi

Lukasz Mazurek’s first cookery lesson was from his grandmother, during one of his visits to her home in their native Poland.

“She’d teach me how to make kopytka [Polish gnocchi], plus lots of other traditional Polish dishes,” he remembers. “But then she would try to get me baking, too, which was really not my thing. I’d be like, ‘No, grandma!’”

Mazurek is talking me through his circuitous journey to his current home in Manchester, and in opening Manchester’s only modern Polish restaurant: Platzki.

Named after Polish potato pancakes, Platzki was selected for its relative ease of pronunciation to English tongues. It offers a twice-weekly changing menu, with new takes on Polish classics, such as spiced carrot pierogi, beef fillet tartare, and smoked cottage cheese cakes. The restaurant is a labour of love and negotiation between Mazurek and his partner and co-owner, Przemek Marcinkowski.

“It’s hard working and living together,” Mazurek admits. “There’s usually a lot of fighting when we’re designing the menu. But now, Marcinkowski gets the final say. He always gets the final say when it comes to food.”

Both Mazurek and Marcinkowski took a convoluted journey to Manchester and in becoming restaurateurs, but Mazurek had the more conventional start, attending catering school in his hometown of Katowice. After graduating, he landed a good job as a chef at a small bistro but soon felt restless. When friends of Mazurek’s living in Ireland urged him to join them, he did, moving to Carrick-On-Shannon in County Leitrim and giving up catering for a job at a construction site.

“I knew it would be temporary,” Mazurek says. “But the whole time I was thinking, ‘I can’t live without cooking, I need to be cooking again.’”

He eventually found a job at a local Italian restaurant but it was only part-time, so he had to work nights alongside days on the construction site. Feeling the effects of working two demanding jobs during the 2008 recession, Mazurek left Carrick-On-Shannon for Manchester, where his mum was living.

“When I landed, I nearly cried,” he admits. “I’d been in Ireland with all this beautiful countryside and on the flight, all I could see were rows and rows of these small brick houses. I just thought, ‘Oh my god, get me out of here.’”

In Manchester, Mazurek worked a series of cheffing jobs at wildly different restaurants and cafes, slowly warming to the city before looking for an opening at a catering company, so that he could learn how to run a business. And it was around this time that Mazurek met Marcinkowski.

“We met on a dating website,” he tells me. “Seven years later we opened Platzki.”

Opening up a contemporary Polish restaurant, as opposed to anything too baroque or traditional, was very important to both Marcinkowski and Mazurek.

“We always wanted to do Polish food with a modern twist,” Mazureki says. “An English audience has something in mind: usually stodgy, oily food. We want to demonstrate that Polish food can be light, it can be fresh. When English people think of Polish food, they might think of pierogi [filled dumplings] or bigos [hunter’s stew]. We wanted to do modern takes on what an English audience might already be familiar with.”

Unlike Mazurek, Marcinkowski has not been formally trained in cooking. He taught himself how to cook during a formative vegetarian phase while living in Poland at a time when vegetarian options in the country were decidedly scarce. Originally from Gorzów, one of Poland’s smaller cities, Marcinkowski spent eight years running his own bodega before moving to London. While working as a pot wash at a Chinese restaurant, Marcinkowski started learning to cook Chinese food. On moving to Manchester, he found work as a pizza and pasta chef, then at a small hotel where he attempted to introduce Polish food to the menu. It didn’t work, so he made the dishes after-hours for staff instead.

It was during Marcinkowski’s stint at the hotel that he and Mazureki began planning their first business: a zapiekanka stand in Spinningfields, Manchester’s financial sector. Zapiekanka is a type of Polish open sandwich, topped with sautéed mushrooms, cheese, and usually, tomato ketchup. Though it is now something of a hipster treat, with street food vendors selling zapiekanki across Poland, it actually dates back to the 1970s. Food shortages were rife but the Polish government allowed a small amount of enterprise and the hastily arranged open sandwich was the result of this. After a year of selling this zapiekanki to bankers, Marcinkowski and Mazureki were served a 28-day notice to leave their premises; prompting them to put together plans for a proper restaurant, with proper dishes. A year later, they opened Platzki.

I ask whether it has been tricky to get Manchester diners on board with Polish food, and Mazureki tells me that while there might be an element of trepidation at the start, people are almost always pleasantly surprised. Interestingly, he says it has been harder to entice a Polish audience to Platzki. Mazureki suspects that this is because Polish people living in the UK are looking for something more obviously rooted in tradition.

“A lot of Polish people living in Manchester are not crazy about us,” he says. “They think it is too modern, too different—they want to go somewhere that just really reminds them of home.”

“The food scene in Poland is changing,” Mazureki adds. “We want to do something that is more representative of Polish food culture as it is now, not something hugely traditional.”

Platzki’s latest project is launching a Polish tapas night, allowing customers a chance to sample a selections of small plates: melted mountain cheese on toast, pork in horseradish sauce, smoked Polish sausages, and of course, pierogi.

Towards the end of our conversation, I give into temptation and ask to buy the four gigantic slices of Polish cheesecake I’ve been eyeing up since I arrived at Platzki. As Mazureki boxes the desserts up, I ask whether he came round to baking in the end. He tells me he has not, and that his mum bakes all the cakes for Platzki. And what does she think of her son’s Polish restaurant?

“What does she think?” Mazureki speculates. “She thinks it’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life.”