How Little Walter’s Creates Innovative Takes on Polish Flavors
The average diner isn’t likely to know much about Polish food (beyond pierogi and kiełbasa, anyway). Even just pronouncing the names of most Polish dishes is nearly impossible, admits Michael Brenfleck, chef-owner of Little Walter’s.
“One of the first documents that I made for my staff was a Polish glossary, essentially with the words that we were using on the menu, with an appropriate pronunciation,” he says. “I wanted to be able to show that we knew what we were talking about, and help teach people who weren’t Polish what certain things were.”
Brenfleck opened Little Walter’s last June, partially as a tribute to his Polish family (his grandfather’s name was Walter) and the Christmas Eve dinners, known as Wigilia, they used to share at his grandparents’ home in Lehighton.
While the restaurant is in East Kensington, not far from the large Polish community in Port Richmond, and is bursting with Polish iconography and ephemera — the side of the building is painted with the country’s red-and-white flag, the hand-painted plates are imported from Poland, the bar is decorated with a Stefen Wisniewski Eagles jersey — he didn’t want to do something overly traditional.
“I think it was always in the back of my mind,” says Brenfleck, who previously served as executive chef at Spice Finch, “that I would love to be able to kind of elevate the food, because that’s not really something that people do.”
The critics have taken note: Little Walter’s, despite giving every outward indication of being a simple neighborhood joint, made The New York Times’s 50 best restaurants list, and Eater Philly called Brenfleck’s take on pierogi the city’s best new dish.
Here are five dishes to order at Little Walter’s to create your own Polish feast.
The Resy Rundown
Little Walter’s
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Why We Like It
It’s a relaxed, neighborhood joint on the north side of Philly that is churning out acclaim-worthy, modern iterations of classic Polish dishes — an under-exposed cuisine that is the very definition of comfort food. -
Essential Dishes
Unsurprisingly, the pierogi Ruskie and the kiełbasa, two staples of Polish cuisine, are sensational must-orders. The bright, tangy surówka salads are a perfect starter, and the roast pork, wieprzowina z rożna, is a must-order main course. Suffice it to say you won’t go home hungry. -
Must-Order Drinks
The Piłkarz, a pickle-juice martini with pickle garnish dedicated to a famous Eagles victory over the Cowboys. For something a little more down-to-earth, opt for the Urbanista: a shot of Żubrówka vodka and a can of Żubr beer.
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Who and What It’s For
It’s a chill spot with a mix of people hanging at the bar and casually dressed couples on low-key dates. The environs are comfortable, and the food comforting, even heavy, so bringing a group so you can try multiple dishes is a good call. -
How to Get In
Reservations are available one month in advance, and Golonka Dinner reservations open on the first of every month for the following month. -
Pro Tip
To go big, reserve a Golonka Dinner. The multicourse tasting menu at the chef’s table for up to six guests includes six cans of Żubr beer and a bottle of Luksusowa vodka. The total cost is $462.96 (plus tax) with two seatings every Saturday night that sell out well in-advance.
1. Surówka
The signature opener is the surówka, or “salad,” a collection of raw and pickled vegetable small plates that rotate with the seasons. On a recent visit, the course included what Brenfleck calls “the most traditional surówka that we’ve had on the menu,” a bowl of lacto-fermented beets, lacto-fermented celery root, and fresh apple, with spearmint, toasted coriander, and a vinaigrette made with apple-cider vinegar and olive oil; lacto-fermented carrots with olive oil, black pepper, and black walnut pistou; and fresh snap peas in a mustard-tehina sauce.
“We wanted to keep that dish completely vegan,” the chef says. “And I have plenty of experience working with tehina at Spice Bench, so that helps. Polish food, does it use tehina? No, but the heck with it — I might as well do what tastes good, right?”
This course also comes with a plate of house-baked rye sourdough and a pair of decidedly non-vegan spreads: dill butter and a lard dip called smalec. “The lard is actually a very traditional thing,” Brenfleck explains. “It’s kind of like a poor man’s butter. When I got it in Poland, it was literally just rendered fat. It was a little off-putting, but I saw that there’s things you can do with this to really elevate it. We turn the skin into chicharrón, so it has a little bit more of a puffy crunch to it, and we also whip the lard, so it’s a little bit lighter, and we add a bit of confit garlic to it to give it some more flavor.”
2. Kiełbasa
One of the staples of Polish cuisine is kiełbasa. Brenfleck dug deep into research to choose the right recipe for Little Walter’s version of the sausage, in which he uses the Boston butt cut of pork shoulder.
“We actually use a very traditional old recipe from a book that I have that has probably over 150 different recipes for different types of polish sausages and charcuteries,” he says. “The one that I chose for our house kiełbasa is zwyczajny — that means “ordinary.” It’s 100 percent pork, although we do cut the pork into different classes, which is a part of the information in this book. The classes are, like, a lean meat, a fatty meat, and then more connective tissue. For each of those classes we’ll cure the pork, and then when we grind each of them in a different size grind. So, the connective tissue will have a much smaller grind, whereas the lean will have a much bigger one. And then we fold those all together with the spices: black pepper, mushroom, coriander, and there’s some garlic in there as well. We case it and smoke it in-house, of course.”
The sausages come on a plate with lacto-fermented pickles and a generous, artful swirl of Pilsudski mustard, made in Shillington, Pennsylvania. “I like to tell people that our slogan is we make everything in-house but the mustard,” Brenfleck jokes. “I tried to make it a bunch of times, and for some reason I just can’t figure out how to get the weird, sharp flavor from the seeds.”
3. Pierogi Ruskie
You’ll be hard-pressed to find a Polish restaurant that doesn’t serve pierogi, but the version Brenfleck turns out at Little Walter’s is transcendent, combining the crispiness of fried dough with the melty textures of the potato-and-farmer-cheese filling and the sour cream and caramelized onion toppings.
“What I was looking for was that really homey, stick-to-your-ribs taste,” the chef says. “The dough is an egg base, essentially a pasta dough, but we incorporate some potato into it, and I think that gives it that fatty, really hearty thing that it has. We also use a little bit of the leftover whey from making the farmer cheese, so it has a little bit more acidity to it as well. And then we leave it a bit thicker than I think most people do with their pierogi.”
“The potato is always Yukons,” Brenfleck says of the filling. “We do some confit garlic in that as well, and lots of black pepper. The lots-of-black-pepper thing was actually something that I experienced when I was in Poland, and I thought it was so stinking good. I don’t put nearly as much as they did at this little grandma shop in Krakow. The second time we went back to Krakow, we were struggling for days to try and find this place. We went back, like, three more times — the best pierogi I’ve had in my life. There’s only so much you can do with dough and potato, but I think the touches that we put in really make it a great dish. It also helps that we make our own sour cream.”
4. Wieprzowina z Rożna
It’s no surprise that the most popular main course here features pork — it is, after all, a Polish restaurant, and one with a pig in its logo, no less. In this case, Brenfleck cooks pork butt and shoulder on a rotisserie over an open wood fire. “A thing that I had been passionate about as I was coming up in my culinary career was using wood fire to cook, and I actually ended up staging at a restaurant once that did rotisserie,” he says. “I was just so drawn to the concept, and it just seems like the best way to cook meat. Knowing that I wanted to do a pork dish, that was kind of where my head went with it.”
Brenfleck covers the pork in mustard and other spices and slow roasts it on the spit for around 12 hours. The dish comes with potatoes, which are roasted over the same fire, below the pork, so the juice drips down on them, and a heaping of a traditional stew called bigos. “It cooks all day over a fire, in a big pot” the chef says of the stew.
“It typically will have both fresh and fermented cabbage, sauerkraut, that we make in house. And it’s called hunter’s stew, so you can kind of throw in any meat you want to. Typically you’ll have kiełbasa and bacon, which ours does. And then we also spike it with a couple of more fun things: We have some dried porcinis that we rehydrate. We have an apple butter sauce, and then a bunch of different spices — paprika, coriander — and we actually get a little bit of miso to give it some umami vibes, too. We put a lot of love into that one.”
5. Sernik
The go-to desert is cheesecake, or sernik. “We actually will use a little bit of farmer cheese in it, so it kind of gives it a little bit more of a ricotta feel to it,” Brenfleck says. The crust incorporates ground and dehydrated bits of leftover house sourdough bread, and the sauce on top — made from poached apples on our visit — rotates with the seasons. “We were doing strawberry early on,” Brenfleck says, “and then peach for a good portion of the summer, and then switched to apple in the fall. Apples are so abundant in Pennsylvania, it kind of made sense to stick with it, but we’ll probably run back to strawberry pretty soon here.”
Bonus: Piłkarz
Each cocktail bears a Polish name for a profession. Take the pickle-juice martini, which is called the Piłkarz, or “footballer. “That’s an Eagles reference, from the Pickle Juice Game,” Brenfleck explains. “Duce Staley ran for 200 yards in the opening game of the [2000] season in Dallas, and it was like 100 degrees out, and it came out that [the Eagles] were all drinking pickle juice to keep their electrolytes up. So that’s where ‘the footballer’ came in to play for the pickle-juice martini.”
More than a few diners at Little Walter’s, no doubt, are downing those martinis with a hearty toast of “Go birds.”
Little Walter’s is open Wednesday to Saturday from 4 to 10 p.m. and Sunday from 12 noon to 8 p.m.
Justin Goldman is a Brooklyn-based writer covering travel, culture, food, and wine. A former editor at Hemispheres, he contributes to Condé Nast Traveler, Wine Enthusiast, the Los Angeles Times, and Eater. Follow him on Instagram. Follow Resy, too.
