Atelier Amaro – Warsaw

Atelier Amaro is the first ever restaurant in Poland to receive a Michelin star – naturally, as I’m Polish, I had to go check it out. The conclusion is that while the food is good, I believe there are some other restaurants in Warsaw that are better yet are unstarred. The issue might be with the chef making up a new menu every single week – that’s 52 different eight-course menus throughout the whole year – a large feat indeed, but unfortunately in that kind of rush there is simply to way to fully and carefully develop a dish. For comparison, at The Fat Duck it takes anywhere from 6 to 12 months from the idea of a dish to when it appears on the table in front of the guests.

The restaurant is small, having only around eight to ten tables. You have a choice of of either three, five, or eight moments. We went for the eight moments together with the wine pairing – that’s 8 different wines and 8 different dishes.

The menu for the night:

• Amuse-bouche: Red-wine jelly with juniper-flavoured popcorn
• Amuse-bouche: Herring in sweet onion sauce
• Amuse-bouche: Deer tongue in tempura, beef foam, deep fried smelt fish
• Wild salmon covered in beeswax, beetroot and fragaria powder, ginger and verbena stock
• Venison slice, mustart powder, pear
• Cabbage soup, foie gras foam, eel
• Goat’s cheese, bison gras, hazelnut
• Apium, ‘goat’s beard’, topinambur
• Cod, wild rose, kale soaked in heated red wine
• Spare rib, apple reduction, hay
• Dessert: Pumpkin sorbet, clove, juniper
• Dessert: Mange hedgehog
• Tea: Pine tree tea with honey
• Chocolate truffles

0.0.1 Possible Improvements

• Fair amount of unpleasant smell (oils) from the kitchen. At the beginning I thought I entered a fish & chips bar and not a Michelin starred restaurant.
• Waiting staff needs to be more educated on pronunciation of French names
• Tables for >2 people should be circular – merging 2-person tables for a group of more than two people makes for a lot of awkward turning for more than 4 hours and leads to neck pain.