Zakopane · Highlander inn · Since 1850
300 metres from Krupówki. The taste of Podhale in an inn with history.
Welcome
Signature Dishes
Discover six dishes that best show the taste of our kitchen: regional, natural and made from scratch. No ready-made semi-products, no artificial flavour enhancers. Just real highlander food, the kind you come to an inn for.
Read more Potato pancakes with goulash , sour cream and cheese+pickled cucumbers/
Read more Minced lamb roast on the grill +sauce + fried potatoes +two salads
Read more Grilled sheep cheese „oscypek” with cranberries
Read more Regional sour cabbage soup with smoked ribs, potatoes
Read more Skewer of pork tenderloin with bacon or onion ,marinated in beer and garlic butter, cheese+ fried potatoes
Read more roasted knuckle of pork ,ribs roasted , blood sausage ,grilled sausage, skewers of poultry,baked potatoes,sauteed white cabbage,pickled cucumbers+mustard and horseradish
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Podhale cuisine, past and present
On the blog we look at old dishes, local ingredients, highlander customs and what is happening in Zakopane's food scene today.
Sour cabbage soup (kwaśnica) Oscypek sheep cheese, and others are still going strong, but many of the traditional highlanders’ dishes have quietly disappeared from tables in the Podhale region. Some were eaten daily for generations, yet today you’d be hard-pressed to find them in local taverns. We’ve compiled a few tasty tidbits about dishes and customs that have faded away or are now cooked only very rarely.
Farming in Podhale has always been a struggle against nature. The short summer, the cold and the stony soil meant that the highlanders could only rely on truly hardy crops. It was these crops that determined what would end up in the pot. Let’s take a look at exactly what grew in the fields of Podhale and why these particular crops have survived for centuries.
If you were to go back 200 or 300 years and sit down at the table in a highlander’s cottage, the menu would take you by surprise. No grilled oscypek with cranberries, no portion of lamb on your plate. The highlanders’ everyday cuisine was the cuisine of poverty: simple, repetitive and entirely dependent on what could be grown on the stony soil. Here’s what the traditional highlander’s table really looked like, according to ethnographers’ records.
For us, a loaf of bread is an everyday staple, bought just round the corner. For the highlanders of old, real bread was a rarity that one had to set out to find, usually as far as Nowy Targ. Why, in a region where food was made from what people grew themselves, did bread in particular have to be obtained from outside the home? The answer lies in the mountain climate and in the history of Podhale’s oldest market town.
When you sit down at a table in our restaurant, you’re eating something with several hundred years of history behind it. But how do we know what the highlanders used to eat before anyone was taking photos of plates or writing food blogs? The answer lies in old documents, manorial records and travellers’ diaries. We’ve gathered for you what has actually been recorded, and we show you where we tread with confidence and where we tread with caution.
Guests
“Great placki po zbójnicku and a smiling Ms Basia”
Our history
U Wnuka has stood on Kościeliska since the year the first cable car opened on Kasprowy Wierch. We have served kwaśnica to skiers, mountaineers, presidents and three generations of Zakopane families, never once closing the kitchen.
Practical
Find us
Kwaśnica is a soup on sauerkraut brine, cooked on smoked ribs or smoked meat, with potatoes. It has a robust, sour taste and warms you up, which makes it a classic of highlander cuisine all year round. At Karczma u Wnuka we serve it in a clay pot, with sourdough bread.
Potato pancakes served with a thick meat goulash. A filling dish of highlander cuisine that tastes best after a day of skiing or hiking. We make them from grated potatoes and our own goulash.
We make our pierogi by hand, with thin dough and fillings rooted in the region: ruskie, with meat, with cabbage and mushrooms, and with Podhale bryndza. We serve them with pork crackling or fried onion.
Grilled oscypek with cranberry is a smoked sheep's milk cheese served warm with cranberry preserve. The combination of smoked, salty cheese and tart cranberry is one of the most recognisable flavours of Podhale.
The harnaś tenderloin is pork tenderloin in mushroom sauce, served with potato flatbreads (moskole), made of boiled potatoes and baked on a griddle. A dish for those looking for hearty, regional cooking in a bolder version.
Lamb is a meat deeply tied to Podhale, where sheep grazing is part of the local tradition. We serve it grilled, with seasonal sides. For many guests it is a dish they will not try anywhere outside a highlander inn.
Cooking based on local produce, dishes made to traditional recipes and the atmosphere of a timber inn in the heart of Podhale. Karczma u Wnuka Restaurant is located at Kościeliska 8, 34-500 Zakopane, just 300 m from Krupówki. Open daily from 12:00 to 21:00, all year round. No reservations needed, with guest parking.
