Ognisko of South Kensington

I initially requested a meeting with Jan Woroniecki to discuss his thoughtful wine pricing. The encounter turned into a two-hour lunch, with an excellent bottle of Mauro Veglio, Gattera 2017 Barolo (£98) and a discussion of the evolution of London restaurants over the past 40 years.

We met at Ognisko, Polish for ‘hearth’ and Woroniecki’s bar and restaurant on the ground floor of the Polish Club, described in Jancis’s recent article about a Polish wine tasting there. Its history is evident as soon as one enters the front door. There are Polish posters on the walls, interspersed with photos of the British royal family (the Duke of Kent is the club’s patron) while around the walls of the bar are portraits of Polish military commanders.

I waited in the bar, visible in the distance in the picture at top of the main dining room, and Woroniecki soon appeared. We were shown to a table right by the entrance from which he could watch everybody coming in (he spotted Pattie Boyd, an old friend) and the cloakroom. That he enjoys his profession is obvious, and he’s been at it long enough to have formed some strong opinions. Quite early in our conversation Woroniecki observed, ‘I can understand the reasons, but I cannot quite comprehend why so many restaurateurs make booking a table so difficult by asking for a credit card, and often debiting it, before the customer has even entered the restaurant. Our profession is surely about making customers feel welcome.’

Woroniecki may be giving his age – 66 – away with such an opinion, but it is arguably justified, for Ognisko is one of London’s busiest, and most unusual, restaurants.

His father was a Polish émigré who settled in London rather than returning to Poland after the war, and became an unsuccessful restaurateur. Woroniecki was far more successful – firstly with his Kavka brand of vodka and then with Baltic Restaurant in Southwark from 2001 until the pandemic closed it in 2021. He remembers being brought to the Polish Club as a child, an institution that by 2013 had fallen on very hard times.

‘But this room still had all its original features because nobody had been allowed to touch it’, he explained. ‘There was a great deal of authenticity. It just needed TLC and lots of it.’ The original room has been expanded over the past decade. A temporary terrace is now permanent, a heated enclosed space that looks on to the verdant Princess Gardens. The bar is busy from 5 pm (‘everybody loves a vodka martini’, Woroniecki quipped with a broad smile – see his drinks list below). And the event space upstairs is busy with weddings aplenty, catered by the restaurant. Close neighbours include Imperial College across the road and the Royal Albert Hall whose Proms season ensures over 100 customers a night in August, a month when few London restaurants are profitable. And even fewer London restaurants are busy for 14 services a week.

That is his explanation. Mine is that the Polish Club, British Poles in general, and indeed any customers, are extremely fortunate that the opportunity to run the restaurant fell to an obviously talented individual with user-friendly opinions on how to run a restaurant. ‘The most important message I try to deliver to my team, some of whom, like Magda our manageress who has been here and at the Baltic for the past 24 years, is to be as flexible and welcoming with our customers as possible. And not to be transactional.’

The wine list he works so hard on plays a significant part here. It is printed on a white cardboard sheet with a dozen fine wines, white and red, printed down the right-hand side of each page. The whites open with a 2021 Talley Vineyards Chardonnay from San Luis Obispo for £82 (just under £40 on Wine-searcher.com) and ends with a Chassagne-Montrachet, Premier Cru Morgeot 2022 from Fontaine-Gagnard for £124 (just under £60 on Wine-searcher.com). There is real value in the red section. The hugely successful Ségla 2016 is £95 (second labels are extremely popular according to Woroniecki and bordeaux is more popular here than burgundy). Vieux Télégraphe 2018 Châteauneuf du Pape is £115, Château La Lagune 2008 is £115, and Château Rauzan-Ségla 2005 is £216. (These are respectively £30, £56, £50 and £110 on Wine-Searcher.com). These are kind mark-ups by central London standards.

‘The list is the result of a great deal of time spent pouring over merchants’ lists and in particular their bin-end offerings’, Woroniecki explained. ‘I used to buy a lot from FMV and today I buy as much from Mark Roberts at Decorum Vintners. I have nothing as rigid as a pricing policy. I think that I only apply a cash margin to the fine wines and treat them as a bit of a loss leader, rather like the way we price caviar, for example. After all, the wine is there to be enjoyed.

The menu is predictably Polish and the quality of the hearty cooking better than one might expect from a basement kitchen connected to the restaurant via a series of dumb waiters, inconveniently placed in a restaurant that never closes. The head chef Jarek Mlynarczyk, formerly at Scott’s, must wrestle with a vast menu. There are 10 starters before the dumplings, the potato pancakes and the blinis, all of which come with different fillings, before eight main courses, three fish and one vegetarian dish. Over two lunches I have enjoyed their smoked eel (pictured above), their herring, their spiced chicken livers with dried cherries and potato pancake (pictured below), and a rabbit leg braised with bacon and vegetables. I have not yet been there when it has been cold enough for their shin of beef in barszcz (borscht) with mashed potatoes.

Most of the staff are Polish or from eastern Europe and, seemingly, notably loyal. ‘Thirty years ago there was a wave of immigration into the UK from Eastern Europe’, Woroniecki explained, ‘and we now find that there are plenty of these peoples’ children, now in their twenties, who want to work here, to keep in touch with their home country. And we get quite a few Ukrainians as well.’

In 2013 the Polish Club signed quite a long lease with Woroniecki that ensures them a percentage of the restaurant’s revenue. Both are doing well out of this arrangement and both deserve to. What may have started as a marriage of convenience has grown because the club chose an experienced individual restaurateur with a proven track record who has put his stamp on what would otherwise have been a restaurant run by committee.

I ended our lunch by asking Woroniecki some personal questions. Firstly, why is there no art on the walls, just some large, attractive floral installations by Rebecca Louise Law? ‘That is my preference’, Woroniecki countered quickly. ‘There’s enough art around the entrance and I don’t want to distract my customers too much.’

How well does he speak Polish, I wondered? ‘Well enough’, came his reply, ‘not to have the wool pulled over my eyes, but not fluently – which stops me being drawn into some of the many heated discussions that can arise here.’

As I was about to leave, I asked Woroniecki about one distinctive aspect of Ognisko’s layout: the presence of the white tablecloths and napkins everywhere. This reminded me of an encounter with my linen supplier who knew from the amount of linen returned quite how busy restaurants actually are rather than how busy the restaurateurs say they are. ‘We spend over £1,000 a week with our laundry supplier and it’s money well spent’, he said. He has much to be proud of.

Ognisko 55 Exhibition Road, London SW7 2PG; tel: +44 (0)20 7589 0101. Open seven days for lunch and dinner.

Photo at top courtesy of Ognisko.

Every Sunday, Nick writes about restaurants. To stay abreast of his reviews, sign up for our weekly newsletter. And to explore the possibilities of Polish wine, check out the 70+ reviews for Polish wines in our tasting notes database.

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Nick Lander