Poles find solidarity in milk bars

Although menus have expanded since the 1990s to include meat, meals are basic and dairy still predominates. Order unwisely and you may end up with boiled pasta topped with plain cream, or a bowl of hot milk with rice.

For accountant Marzena Balazy, the food is a link to her heritage. “You can eat the same things you would eat at home. It’s all very traditional Polish food, but I don’t know how to make it myself,” she says.

While most milk bars these days are privately owned, they still receive government subsidies for basic foodstuffs. This allows owners to keep their prices rock-bottom.

A plate of pirogi (ravioli stuffed with meat, vegetables, or cheese) costs around $2, while a couple of sweet, jam-filled nalesniki (Polish crepes) is only $1. The dozen or so soups on the menu are no more than 50 cents each.

Incomes have been rising rapidly, and with an abundance of new restaurants cropping up across the country, the Polish government has begun to question the need for milk bars. But Poles refuse to let them go. When the finance minister threatened to cut milk bar subsidies in 2002, deafening protests from across the political spectrum forced him to back down. So beloved are the little canteens that in 2006 The New York Times reported that Polish immigrant communities have opened up their own milk bars in Brooklyn, with much the same atmosphere and menu as the originals back home.

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Alicja Samarcew, a psychologist who still frequents milk bars about once a week, always makes a point of taking foreign visitors there because, she says, “it’s something really Polish.”

Ms. Samarcew has her own theories on why these spare cafes are still relevant in Poland, and how an institution imposed by a repressive regime could remain so firmly rooted in the country’s collective self-image.

“For one thing, it’s a place to socialize,” she says. “I still meet people there that I’ve seen for years. They tell the same stories, and everybody knows them. It provides a sense of continuity in people’s lives.”

But, she points out, milk bars play an even more important social role. “I wouldn’t say it’s real because there are poor people, it’s not about that. But you are exposed to different categories of people in a milk bar, and I think this is really important. Old people come, often alone and lonely, and it can be hard to see. When we go to a restaurant, it’s easy for us in the middle class to think we’re the only people in the city. But when you go to a milk bar, that illusion is gone.”

“Maybe it’s something really Polish that we don’t isolate these people in ghettos,” she continues. Indeed, one of Samarcew’s favorite milk bars still occupies a slice of prime real estate on one of Warsaw’s most fashionable shopping streets.

It’s a socialist ideal that somehow managed to rise above the hated system from which it was born. Who knows how much longer milk bars will hold out against the fast-food invasion, but for the moment, these simple cafes are a heartwarming sign that Poland won’t be giving up so easily.

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