Founded in 1940 by the Polish government-in-exile, Ognisko was home for a nation that had lost its country. It still is.
Ognisko sits in a grand stucco villa on Prince’s Gate in South Kensington, with two thousand eight hundred and six reviews and a 4.7 – one of the highest scores on a large sample in this entire survey. And its story is not really a story about a restaurant. It is a story about a country that lost itself and built a home in exile.
The hearth
“Ognisko” means “hearth” in Polish – the fire at the centre of the home, the source of warmth and light and gathering. The Polish Hearth Club, Ognisko Polskie, was founded in 1939 and 1940, jointly by the British government and the Polish government-in-exile, after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland and extinguished it as a nation.
The Polish government fled – first to France, then to Britain – bringing with them the surviving fragments of the Polish army and the leadership of a country that no longer existed on the map. And in South Kensington, in this building, they made a hearth: a place for the exiled government, the officers, the pilots, the diplomats and the intellectuals of a nation in exile to gather, to be Polish, to keep the fire burning while their homeland was occupied.
It was inaugurated on 16 July 1940 by Prince George, Duke of Kent, alongside the exiled Polish president and prime minister. The first chairman was, remarkably, a Briton – the former British Consul General in Warsaw. It was, from the start, an Anglo-Polish institution, born of the alliance that sent Polish pilots into the Battle of Britain that same summer.
The nation that could not go home
Here is the tragedy at the heart of it. When the war ended in 1945, Poland was not freed – it fell under Soviet control, behind the Iron Curtain. The Polish soldiers who had fought for the Allies, the government that had governed in exile from London, could not go home. Home was gone, occupied by a different power.
So the exile did not end. Some two hundred thousand Polish veterans and their families settled in Britain under the Polish Resettlement Act. And Ognisko remained what it had been – the hearth, the gathering place, the piece of Poland that existed in London because Poland itself was unreachable. For decades, it hosted the exiled intellectual and cultural elite, the survivors of Poland’s pre-war theatre and cabaret, reviving their productions on its stage for an audience that could not go home.
One visitor recalls that her grandfather brought her mother and grandmother straight to Ognisko the moment they arrived on English soil, after fifteen years separated by the Iron Curtain. That is what this building was: the first place you came, the hearth you returned to, the home that stood in for the one you had lost.
The restaurant now
The club still exists, and since 2013 its dining rooms have been run as one of the best Polish restaurants in London – open to all, members and non-members alike, in one of the most beautiful dining rooms in the city, with a covered terrace over Prince’s Gardens. The food is proper Polish cooking, the vodka is taken seriously, and the 4.7 across nearly three thousand people is entirely earned.
Verdict
Beautiful, historic, superbly rated, and carrying a weight of history that almost no restaurant on earth can match – the hearth of a nation in exile, still burning after eighty-five years.
Go, eat pierogi, drink vodka, and raise a glass in the hearth that kept a country alive when it had nowhere else to be.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
