In Poland has blown up the milk bar mania. A phenomenon that confirms how it is possible to transform the communist inheritance’ relics in real cult places. These are little state-owned restaurants, born in 1960 to offer low-coast meals to workers, whose name comes from the fact that meals served are vegetarian, as far as meat was a rare and valuable good during the regime. Where still today, with the equivalent of € 3, it is possible to eat the daily menu (the only one available) of the traditional polish cuisine. There are three main courses, exclusive of dessert, of obviously not a supreme quality, that allows the consumer to taste a real trip to the past, when these places were the sole fast foods around, but were preferred to the home lunch.
The atmosphere is still the same, thanks to the poor service that does sharpen the appetite. Rooms have essential furniture, are shabby if not ramshackle, the waiters are offhand and sometimes even rude. Not to talk of the company at the tables, where the new poor sit side by side: old people, homeless and students with low budget.
The aim of this “restaurant”, still state-funded, is to fill the belly of people with scarce means. But it is increasingly intriguing also the tourists. Many Polish citizens are eager to preserve this piece of soviet welfare, as it was proven on 2002, when the Minister of Finance, thinking about its scope in recent times, proposed to cut the funds. Triggering, in this way, a transversal defence in order to maintain the beloved milk bar alive.
This is a thing of the past, since they were born during the cold war in order to provide a low-cost square meal to workers of factories and companies that did not have canteens. Today, there is at least one milk bar for each main city, and sometimes even in fashion districts. It is important to notice that starting from 2006 came up several milk bars even in Brooklin, which are exactly alike the originals, on the initiative of Warsaw immigrants.
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