Eighty-five per cent of this city was rubble in 1945, which changes what old means here. The genuinely old rooms in Warsaw are the communist ones, because everything before them was carried away in carts. So this road drinks in a 1950s modernist railway pavilion and in Stalin's tower, crosses the river to the one district the war largely spared, and takes in a cellar on a square that was rebuilt from paintings. Five stops, cabs between them.
- 1 · The Cold Open
Klub SPATiF
Up a staircase off Aleje Ujazdowskie, behind a door with nothing on it, in rooms that belong to the actors' and film-makers' association. For decades this was where Warsaw's theatre people drank after the curtain, in a country where what you said in public and what you said at this table were different things, and the reputation it earned then is not a marketing story. It still runs late, still dark, still full of people who work in the business, and the programme now takes in jazz, stand-up and drag. Go up, order at the bar, and do not expect anyone to make a fuss of you.
the actors' club, and still theirs · evening till very late · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
Warszawa Powiśle
Arseniusz Romanowicz and Piotr Szymaniak built a railway stop here between 1954 and 1963, and its ticket office is a small concrete pavilion sitting on a footbridge over the tracks with a canopy that reads, unmistakably, as a flying saucer. A Swiss critic called this pair's stations pearls on rails and the phrase stuck. The tickets moved out, the pavilion sat empty, and in 2009 it became a bar. Buy a beer through the old ticket window and drink it outside, above a working railway line, in the best piece of post-war architecture anyone has ever put a bar in. Note that it now runs as a seasonal room, so check before you set off outside summer.
a 1954 ticket office, drinking since 2009 · seasonal, afternoon till late · verified Aug 2026
- 3 · The Anchor
U Fukiera
A wine merchant called Grzegorz Korab put a house on this square in the early sixteenth century and opened a wine store in its cellars. The Fukier family took it over in the early eighteenth and kept back the oldest bottles until the collection became famous across Europe; Florian Fukier ran the trade in Hungarian wine here for more than thirty years until 1837. Then the Germans levelled the entire Old Town in 1944 and this square was rebuilt after the war from paintings and photographs, brick by brick, which is why UNESCO lists it. It is expensive now and run by the country's best known television cook. Have one glass in the courtyard and understand what you are standing in.
wine sold here since the 1500s · dinner · verified Aug 2026
- 4 · The Wildcard
W Oparach Absurdu
Cross the river to Praga, which matters because the Red Army halted on this bank in 1944 and watched the other side burn, so these are real pre-war buildings with real bullet holes rather than reconstructions. This was among the first bars to open on Ząbkowska when the district began to turn, and it invented the format that every other one copied: carpets, oil paintings nobody claims, school desks, communist-era lamps, several connected rooms of mismatched furniture that looks like four grandmothers died at once. The name means in the fumes of absurdity. It is still the best of them because it was the first and it never smartened up.
the bar that started Ząbkowska · evening till late · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Bar Studio
Finish inside the Palace of Culture and Science, which Stalin gave Warsaw in 1955 and which Varsovians have been trying to feel one clear way about ever since. There is an old line that the best view in the city is from its terrace, because it is the only view that does not include the building. Bar Studio belongs to the theatre on the ground floor and is nothing like the tower above it: big windows, good records, people arguing about a play they have just watched. Drink under the thing the city cannot decide whether to love, then walk out across Plac Defilad to bed.
in the tower Stalin gave, 1955 · till late · verified Aug 2026 · 🏨 the night ends at Hotel Warszawa
🎁 What we left off, and why. The road used to open on Pijalnia Wódki i Piwa and Meta na Foksal, thirty-four metres apart, and both sell the same thing: a recreation of a 1980s Polish bar, with the propaganda posters and the herring and the vodka priced like the old days. Pijalnia is a chain with branches all over the country. They are good fun and neither is a relic, and on a road that can put you inside a 1955 railway pavilion and Stalin's own tower, drinking in a copy of that era twice would be the wrong evening. If you want the pastiche it is on Nowy Świat and it is cheap.