Krakow (Cracow) Travel Guide

Eating Out

There’s a good selection of bars, cafes and restaurants to be found all over the city, but the old city centre boasts the widest range of choices. In the summertime especially, the streets in this area closed to vehicular traffic are home to lively sidewalk cafes and restaurants.

Over the past few years, a number of restaurants featuring international cuisines have opened here as well, covering the range from Chinese and Indian to Italian and French.

A major part of the Polish diet is soup, and this is often treated as a meal in its own right: soups are traditionally made with beans and peas, and are quite thick. Barszcz, on the other hand, is a clear soup made from beets, and has long been a favourite; and zurek, a soured barley soup, is an acquired taste but also quite popular.

Pork is one of the major meat ingredients in the local cuisine: the variety is enormous, including wild boar, suckling pig and a number of types of traditional dried, smoked sausages (kabanos), and kielbasa, a type of sausage which requires cooking.