"We ran into this restaurant when walking along Nowy Swiat, looking for lunch. I consulted Yelp to find nearby restaurants serving Polish specialities and found this one just a block away. The welcoming was kind of jaded, but we were hungry and had patience with the zombie like service. All of us tried some of the different pierogi (dumplings) they offered: traditional with cabbage and mushrooms, russian style and spinach with cheese. They were all OK and my favorite were the spinach ones. To that we had beer and that was where things started to go wrong. If the food was traditionally Polish, so was the service, which could best be described as the one I remember from the worst restaurants during the communist time. This means a minimum of service from an uninterested person that take time. Really strange, as the waitress who served us was probably not even born at the time when that kind of service was kind of common in the eastern countries. One of my friends discovered the opened plastic cover of a toothpick in his beer, and we let the waitress know as soon as we managed to get her attention. Without a flinch, she mumbled something about crediting the beer and just left, taking his beer with her. When we saw her again, we were still a little uncertain about her first comment so we asked, with the intention of ordering a new beer for my friend but we never got that far. She just repeated that the beer would be credited and left before we had the chance to ask for another beer. As the food was OK, I hope the mishap with the beer and service was just a bad day for the wautress, but having talked to my non Polish guests about the Polish cuisine and hospitality, Dawne Smaki just left me with a feeling of embarrassment in front of them. There are too many good restaurants to go back."
