Last five years has helped to energize, illuminate Warsaw
Warsaw is so much brighter, even in the dead of winter, than it was five years ago.
The light voltage has been turned up. More "decor" means more mood lighting, usually in warm colors like peach to mitigate the dark outside, with Restauracja 99 no longer having the corner on "warmth." Another one making its mark is Zacheta restaurant (below the art gallery by the same name near Saski Park), which has an unequivocal red, no mush-colors in between and a cloakroom guy who smartly insists you take the retaurant's card.
And whereas in the first five years of the transition shop and cafe owners felt lucky even to get the bottom floor of the apartment flats now many are scooping out a cathedral-high window space and sometimes also wangling to get a second floor for a two-floor display. And lights.
It's not just on ulica Nowy Swiat, although that mega-glitz street continues to upgrade and the season's Christmas lights are splendid (even if they do have Plus GSM logos in the middle of the lighted garlands crossing the street). There's a momentum on ulica Jana Pawla II, with the Atrium seeming to anchor the activity to the south. One sideways standout: Katarzyna Pospieszynski's elegant Panska Klub on the street of the same name. She recently played host to the Canada-Poland Business Club where her son Ryszard is president.
A lot more is happening between the Atrium and several blocks north. The Guiseppe cafe has made its outdoor awning a permanent glassed-in fixture. Time Cafe continues to pull in the crowds, breakfast through early dinners. And, at long last, there are more and more sit-down coffeehouses in the Old Town and in the new town to the north. You can almost have a kawa every block these days. That's progress, especially in what was almost dead space on ulica Freta after Pod Samsonem and Pozegnanie z Afryka (Out of Africa), until you got to the oldie veggie restaurant, Nowe Miasto. Now you've got the casually elegant two rooms of Fret@Porter on Nowe Miasto square across from the vegetarians and not only is the cappuccino good, so are the wall hangings, oils by major artists including "colorist" Tadeusz Dominik.
A block on, Arkadiusz Walerczuk was hard at work finishing floors and polishing the bar in what promises to be an eclectic addition to the block. He and partner Piotr Gutfeld are calling the cafe "Polyester" and it will open before Christmas. Sylwia Gutfeld said they were novices, sort of, in the kawiarna business "but it sounded like fun. And we designed it all ourselves." She's worked at Blikle Cafe and her husband worked at the Metal Bar.
And, next door, while the one-room CD and antique record store is crowded as usual, painters and floor finishers are working nights in the adjoining two rooms to finish what will be a jazz cafe with live music. That ought to provide a two-way synergy. And it also shows that there IS life after Akwarium.
It's not just in the cafe and music scene that Poles are staking out turf, almost a decade after the multinationals put down roots and drew record crowds. The Western fast-food places caught on partly because there was a vacuum, with no locals on the scene (especially not Hortex, the only possible contender from the past) and partly because the food was cheap, the service fast and the atmosphere was bright and light. It was a huge shift from state socialism when milk bars, real bars and the rare coffee shops were smoky and dark by design, since being "seen" was not necessarily desired or even safe.
Today's business mix also is reflecting the new and confident growth of Polish-owned companies.
"Our clients are about 50-50 Polish and international," said Heidrick & Struggles' London-based managing partner Bruce C. Beringer, who came in to mark the company's fifth anniversary in Poland. "In greenfields, Poles are growing very fast." He remembered his first trip here in 1989, looking for a banker to recruit for the Amerbank start-up office here. "The phones didn't work either from abroad or from the Marriott. So I walked over to the ministry (of privatization) and knocked on doors."
Five years ago, "almost 100% of our business was from the outside. Now, most of the business is generated from within Poland," he said. "Unfortunately, we haven't seen any Polish companies asking for our services outside of Poland."
