“This food has a future and we need to fight for it. We believe in that.” These were the spirited words of Iwona Slowik, as she and her husband, Łukasz, pulled down the shutters on Polka Polish Cuisine for the final time last Sunday.
Owning their own authentic Polish restaurant has been a dream of Iwona and Łukasz since they first arrived in Galway, the day after they got married in Poland in August 2015.
For the past 22 months they have been living that dream, and building a loyal clientele of both Irish and Polish customers. But, despite a growing reputation, the cost of doing business in Ireland has become too much to handle in recent months, and the couple have had no choice but to close their restaurant for good.
“It was always her dream,” says Łukasz. “She used to say, ‘You’ll see, one day I will have my restaurant’. She went to the Local Enterprise Office and they helped us to find this place and help us to set up everything. They believed in us.
“When we first opened we got a lot of people from the Polish community coming to eat here but we didn’t just focus on them. Now it is about half Irish and half Polish. The Irish people seem to like it a lot. They like the schnitzel.”
Having worked in Polish restaurants for 20 years before coming to Ireland, Iwona is no stranger to the ups and downs of the industry. However, the pressure on Irish restaurants in recent years is like nothing she has ever seen before.
“It was a very hard decision [to close]. I had depression for one month, I was crying every day,” she says. “This was my dream. But we have to close the restaurant and change what we do to minimise costs.
“The costs were too much ... we must pay VAT, electricity is high, the ingredients are costing more. Everything is going up and up. We are doing everything ourselves: managing, cooking, everything. We were thinking that we might be able to have some staff to help after a while but it was too expensive for us.”
Łukasz says “the VAT rate [bringing it back to 9 per cent] would make it a bit easier, there are a lot of things that could help a little”.
“Our location is not where the tourists go, so we are dependent on the local people and the local people don’t have the money to spend that they did before. Everybody has a hard situation now with the cost of living. We see that.”
Large sections of the Polish community were present for their final night of service, including Dominic Nowicki, Paulina Ciaston and their two young children.
“It is a good chance to show our kids about all the varieties of food that we have in Poland,” says Ciaston. “It is something Polish, something traditional that we can have, even though we are far away from home.”
“We don’t live in Galway any more but we came here today for this,” says Nowicki. “It is sad that this place is closing. When we used to live in Galway we were always looking for the Polish restaurants. It is good for the Polish community to go to a restaurant and experience this food.”
Among the Irish diners present on Sunday were Ann Deely from Loughrea and Ciara Daly from Corrandulla, who works to support small independent local food producers.
“I am working so closely with people in the industry that I feel their stress,” says Daly. “I’ve taken on their stress, just hearing how things are going.
“I work with a group of around 400 food producers. Recently someone put out a question into the group asking how many people were double-jobbing and nearly half of these food producers had a second job.
“It has always been hard for a restaurant to make a profit but in the last two years it has got a lot worse. I fear for the future of the business, 100 per cent, absolutely. We are losing our small, unique restaurants and replacing them with corporate coffee shops. It’s a massive issue. It’s scary.”
Sunday was Deely’s first time in Polka Polish Cuisine but she says it is an experience she would love to be able to repeat.
“The place is such a hidden gem. I’m really sad to see it going,” she says. “The food is really fresh, really filling. I had never been to a Polish restaurant before this one. Before I came here I didn’t know what the food was going to be like but it was beautiful.
“The choice is getting more limited. Places are closing but, in Galway anyway, new places don’t seem to be opening. Any of the new ones that open seem to be closing again pretty quickly.”
Now that Polka Polish Cuisine has closed, Łukasz and Iwona will try something different, providing a pre-order takeaway service by either renting a commercial kitchen by the hour, or sharing a kitchen with another restaurant. It is something they hope can keep their business alive, until running a sit-down restaurant is more feasible again.
“We have the possibility to rent a commercial kitchen per hour, but maybe we will stay in this location and share the kitchen with someone else. We don’t know,” says Łukasz.
“We have the website polka.ie and the idea is that people pre-order the dishes the day before so that we know what we have to prepare. Then we can decide to rent the kitchen for two hours or three hours, depending on how many orders we have.”
Iwona is hopeful that this will be only a temporary change.
“It’s not the same as what we have now but we will try,” she says. “Maybe in the future things will be easier and we can open again.”
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