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Did you knew that people first grew carrots as medicine, not food, for a variety of ailments? Carrots can be traced back about 5,000 years through historical documents and paintings. No one knows exactly when the first carrots appeared, because many people mistook them for parsnips, a close relative of the carrot. A week or two ago - mind me not, time flies by so fast, I cannot keep track! - I went with my lovely Romanian friends to another Restaurant. You may remember me telling you the story about MAMALYGA - NOT A Romanian Restaurant.

This time we went to the Old Jewish District, in Kazimierz, to a typical Polish Restaurant. Marchewka z Groszkiem is one of the first Restaurants in the area. Before the movie Schindlers List became popular, Kazimerz was quite a ruin and not a very safe place to live, but the popularity of the movie and the increasing number of visitors coming from inside the country and outside, made the city change. Marchewka z Groszkiem is very popular now in the city and you can see the place filled with locals, feeling very much at home - which is a very good thing, as usually where locals eat then there is where you should go as they would not accept less than the original recipe!

The Restaurant scored on Tripadvisor #265 out of 913 Restaurants in Krakow. It is open Sunday to Saturday from 9 am to 10 pm and can be found in the Kazimerz district, on ulica Mostowa 2. On its Facebook page it scored by 2/20/2015 a number of 1700 people who like the page and 4.3 out of 5 starts on the review. You can check their menu online, both on their Facebook page and on their regular Internet page and make up your mind in advance :) Pretty much the whole menu is traditional Polish dishes, homemade taste ;) You can also make reservations but you need to be there in time - or have a maximum 15 min delay - or else the reservation will be taken by someone else, and trust me there are people who stay in line to get here!

Queue to our story, on a lovely Sunday afternoon - around 3 pm - lunch time. Of course, we did not have any reservation - a party of 3 ladies should never be an issue! so we ended up staying in line - like several other Polish people - waiting for a table to clear up inside. Fortunately someone who made the reservation for a round table for 4 did not make it in the 15 minutes... Happy us! :)

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It is a medium size cafe/restaurant with 4 small room interconnected in the shape of a turned L. As you enter you have one room after another, or you can take the left and have another 2. Marchewka z Groszkiem is not self service, so you need to wait for the waitress to come take your order - PLUS: they have menu in English language; MINUS: the waitresses are not overjoyed/extremely friendly. But the food does make up for it :) As the restaurant is named Marchewka z Groszkiem I believe that calls for a translation - the name means Carrots and Peas, so I wanted to taste something specific of the house.

I settled down on testing the specialty of the house: cream soup with carrots and peas (320 gr for only 5.5 zloty), which was a wonderful surprise for me - especially as I quite dislike carrots, unless they are baby carrots :) It was just the right consistency, creamy and tasy, and it came in a bowl split it two - as you can see in the pictures above. The combination of the 2 colors and their consistency was just perfect. They did not blend into eachother and they stayed in place. I believe it was the perfect double-cream-soup I ever tasted!

The restaurant is very children friendly and I saw a lot of families with small kids while we were there - they even have a corner with books and toys for all ages! We kinda figured out at that point that even the food is baby-friendly as it was so smooth and tasty that even a baby could have gulped that down and be happy. 

As a second course I had the weirdest thing I could find on the menu! I had Ukrainian styled pancakes with potatoes, meat and sour cream on top (11.50 zloty for the 2 pancakes). I never tasted anything like it and it took me a while to figure out if I like it or not. For sure I would have put less potatoes in, but hey! I aint a big fan of potatoes either! so dont listen to me... I would for sure try pancakes again there, but with a different filling. One of my friends had the one with spinach and it looked delicious - the pancakes even had slightly different, dark red, color due to the paprika :) We exited the Restaurant quite full and positively impressed over the place - good food, good prices but they really need to work out a bit on the whole attitude of the waitresses. We recommend it and would like to try it again when a bit of sun comes :) maybe on the terrace!

Yours truly,

The Twisted Red LadyBug That Loved The Carrots & Peas Cream Soup