Having lived in Poland for over 2 years now, you might think that I have settled into a pattern, with the places that I visit. In some cases, you’d be right. If I feel like a cheap and delicious meal, I’ll head for pancakes at Manekin. If I want to watch an English football match on a Saturday afternoon, it’s Kubryk. There are many such cases. But when I’m grocery shopping, it’s completely different. Like a game of top trumps, every grocery store in Poland has its strengths and weaknesses. Here’s my list:
Alma or Piotr i Pawel – the M&S Food & Waitrose of Poland have a reasonable range of stuff, but often charge astronomical prices quite unjustifiably. Possibly, this is to do with them knowing that soft stomached foreigners will go there, and part with their non-złoty salaries.
Biedronka (Ladybird) – This is an odd one. A bargain basement supermarket which conspicuously & exclusively sells its own brands in almost all aisles besides alcohol, it’s a pretty safe bet for fresh produce, is cheap and has a good range of meat. Sadly, it has a woeful cheese selection and huge swathes of “essential” items missing from its catalogue.
Lidl – All you Brits thinking of this as a budget store need to know that this is in fact a mid range store in Poland. It has themed weeks where you can occasionally pick up such marvels as Mexicana cheddar(!), or Danish Seaberry jam(?). Unfortunately, it lets itself down on range. Their frozen foods read like a menu from the worst school dinners purveyors of England and, just as you get to the end of the “specialty aisle” expecting more food, there is a strange abundance of car products.
Real – I sometimes feel that describing a town as having a Real is a misnomer. Rather the Real has its own town. These places are invariably huge. The contents stacked in aisle after aisle, on shelf after shelf, each taller than a particularly well grown giraffe. Quality of their own products is revealed by ingredients panels with only two entry: “dust” and “despair”. The staff are suitably miserable, aggressive or lazy. On the plus side, they do set up paddling pools of live carp near Christmas, so that you can buy a great beast to bludgeon to death for the big day.
Tesco – in Poland, Tesco is a really quite cheap store. Sadly, it looks the part. Staff rarely bother to take stock out of its warehouse packing boxes, even on supposedly attractive promotional display stacks. They have a reputation for selling animal products well beyond their best before date and their fresh fruit and vegetables often look like they’ve simply been left in the road for a month before being piled back in to the store. They also have the most bizarre alcohol policy, since introducing automated tills, whereby you have to pay for everything but your alcohol first at the self service machine, and then go on to the shame alcohol sales point, so that you can be made to feel like a homeless drunken oaf. I am but 2 of those 3 things!
Twój Market – If you asked the owner of this chain what their unique selling point was, s/he wouldn’t know. I have eaten good cakes there. I have also seen many a tramp walk into the glass doors shortly before opening on a Sunday. Other than that it’s expensive, poorly stocked, not particularly friendly, garishly bright red and yellow in colour and always missing at least 50% of the things you need for literally any meal.
The result of all this is that you can never do a “big shop” at one market and be done with it. You have to go to each one for what they’re “good” at and then on to the next. Making a curry becomes like some sort of real time strategy game, where you must assemble your core components, and then purchase accessories, until you have a fully functioning meal. By this time, of course, it’s been hours, you’ve walked miles and you need another meal. So off you go again on another misadventure.
Quite apart from that being all, you also have the bizarreness of some supermarket experiences in Poland. This past weekend I was in Biedronka in Szwederowo. I wanted to buy some chicken thighs (amongst other things). So I approached the fridge, where a bountiful pile awaited me. This side of the fridge had no handle. I tried to prise it open, to no avail and then tried to get at the chicken from the other side of the fridge. Nothing doing here, either. So I stopped a shop assistant and asked her how to open the fridge:
Shop Assistant: “You can’t open it, there’s no handle.”
Kev: “OK, so how do I get chicken thighs?”
S.A.: “You can’t.”
Kev: “Who buys them?”
S.A.: “Nobody.”
Kev: “So what happens?”
S.A.: “We throw them away when they are expired.”
This weekend, I’m trying Kaufland.
A City Called Bydgoszcz 