History Repeating
As a child of the 1980s, I've never had much use for nostalgia I can happily do without nuclear paranoia costumed by Ralph Lauren and scored by Huey Lewis and the News. So I was left cold by Dekada's design conceit, which brings together two very different 1950s: that of consumption-driven America and Stalinist Poland.
Dekada is not primarily a restaurant; the priority is obviously in drawing a bar crowd that likes the retro vibe and will stick around until all that drinking, flirting, and live-music listening makes them hungry. The menu has been designed accordingly, with both Polish and American takes on absorbent, no-frill foods like pierogi, burgers and steaks, although there's also salads for the delicate.
High point: Most definitely the honey-coated chicken wings, which came piping hot with sides of generic-seeming but nummy plum sauce and BBQ sauce. Unlike other non-Asian food I'd had in Warsaw that was advertised as spicy, the wings left a nice slow burn in the back of my mouth, just as I'd hoped they'd would.
Low point: Things went rapidly downhill after the chicken wings. The innocent bystander's grilled sirloin steak was small and overdone. Part of its side order comprised the limpest asparagus known to man as well as seemingly grilled Brussels sprouts a concept we found as odd as going all nostalgic for the just-revving-up commie 1950s. The McD's fries were also disappointing, when we'd expected Dekada to go for a more custom-made version higher up on the french fry food chain (spicy fries, curly fries, thick-cut home fries, etc.) And I was unimpressed with either my potato pancakes soggy and barely warm, as if fried on too low a heat and then microwaved or my grilled meat platter, whose heap of chicken, beef, Polish bacon and sausage could have used a marinade (where appropriate), a more textured, pungent sauce than the now-ubiquitous plum and BBQ, or simply bread to soak up the grease.
Miscellaneous: Perhaps the cheap aluminum cutlery is what our ancestors on either side of the ideological divide used to eat their food with under Eisenhower and Bierut, but sometimes striving for authenticity can go to far. Kudos for the menus, though, which feature articles, photographs and innocently unfunny cartoons from Polish periodicals published during the decade of the moment. Although the food entries on the inside are a trifle hard to read, it's a great concept.
Atmosphere: Contrived bar/diner, complete with tables in: a cavernous, cobblestoned main room; a reproduction of a tram; a cross between a Campbell's soup can and a jukebox diner; and a smaller room set up to look like a 1950s kitchen.
The variety of seating venues inside Dekada mean you can choose to be semi-private or part of a milling crowd. When we were there on a late weekday night, the place was packed with a mid-20s to early-40s clientele doing their thing as couples, lone diners, and frenetically partying groups to what can most kindly be described as a Holiday Inn lounge act.
Service: Pleasant and workmanlike. It took a while for someone to take our order, though, despite the fact that our waitperson's section wasn't full.
Prices: Reasonable. A two-course dinner for two with beer came to zl. 130 ($29).
When to go: Pop tart I may be, but I draw the line at any place that plays Phil Collins' "Sussudio." Going by the swollen clientele and the frequent number of times someone or other has mentioned they'd been there, however, it's obvious I'm in the minority. Take a high-energy group with a well-developed thirst, and check it out for yourself.
