Bigos, barszcz and an underrated beef broth

Before you ask: what actually is this?

There are two words on our menu that make people at the table pause for a moment. Bigos. Barszcz. Then they look up and ask: what exactly is that?

An entirely fair question. So let us talk tachles.

Both dishes come from Polish cooking, which in Vienna has long since stopped being exotic — and yet not everyone knows what is coming when they order. So we explain it here. What we do not do: write down a recipe. We are a restaurant, not a cooking blog. Exactly how these things come about in our kitchen stays in the kitchen, and that is not a marketing secret but simply somebody else's job.

Two people do that job here. Magdalena Mitura, a founder, has the kitchen as her kingdom. She weighs, she measures, she tastes, she changes something again — grandmothers' recipes and her own get the same treatment. Marcin Gorski, also a founder, trained as a chef — and when somebody is missing out in the room, he stands there too.

That is the whole difference this text is about: home cooking that does not pretend to be restaurant cuisine.

Bigos: the dish you are not supposed to tell stories about

Bigos is a braised dish based on cabbage. That is the honest short version, and on first reading it sounds like very little. In Poland, bigos is roughly what a good goulash is in Vienna: a classic about which every family has its own opinion, and about which nobody can stay neutral.

If you google „bigos", you are almost certainly looking for a recipe. Most people are. If you are one of them: good luck, and come by afterwards so that you know what you are actually cooking towards. We will not give you one here. Not out of secrecy, but because writing down a bigos recipe makes about as much sense as instructions for listening.

What we can tell you: bigos is not a dish you make quickly. It is not one that looks good either. It arrives brown on the plate, it has no crown of herbs on top, and if you photograph it, it looks like — well, like bigos. Which is exactly why it is on no menu that has one eye on Instagram.

It is on ours. Because it tastes good, and because it suits this place: the name Tachles comes from Yiddish and means getting straight to the point. A dish that pretends nothing is already rather close to the concept.

Barszcz: red, clear, and mostly misunderstood

Barszcz is a soup based on beetroot. For many Viennese guests that is the first surprise — they expect something thick, creamy, heavy on the spoon. What they get is something clear.

The second surprise is the colour. Beetroot produces a red you can hardly believe is real, and that is exactly what makes the soup so hard to fake. Anyone working with shortcuts here shows it immediately in the bowl. It is one of the few dishes where the look actually gives something away.

Barszcz stands on our menu together with bigos, the pierogi and szarlotka — those are the four we are measured by. And barszcz is the one people are most likely to try first, because a soup is a small decision. You risk little. A surprising number order it again on their second visit before they dare to try anything else.

If you are wondering whether you need prior knowledge for it: no. You do not need to know anything about Polish cooking to recognise a good soup in Vienna. When in doubt that is the only qualification that counts here.

Beef broth with noodles: the quiet star nobody writes about

And now comes the part we actually wanted to keep to ourselves.

Our menu carries a beef broth with noodles. No exclamation mark, no recommendation, no little star. It just stands there, among things that sound more spectacular. And many of our guests consider it the best in Vienna.

That is a big sentence in a city where beef broth is an institution. We are aware how it sounds. We did not make it up — it comes from people who eat here and tell us, often in that slightly astonished voice of someone who has found something where they were not looking.

Why does nobody write about it? Because it stands in the shade. Gault&Millau 2026 called our pierogi „probably the best in Vienna", and when a sentence like that is on the menu, nobody reads two lines further. Seven kinds of pierogi, vegan ones among them — against that, a beef broth with noodles has no chance in advertising terms. It is the dish without a press pack.

But that is precisely the best test of a kitchen. Any place can pull off a signature dish; all the attention flows there. It gets interesting at the second rank: the soup, the palatschinken, the sweet pierogi, the spaghetti bolognese. The things nobody names as a reason when you ask them why you should come.

If those are right too, somebody there is cooking for the guests. If not, somebody there is cooking for the review.

Why this tastes like home and not like a restaurant

At home nobody cooks for the photograph. There is no plate with three dots and a lot of white rim, there is no foam, and nobody builds your food into a little tower. There is simply enough of it, it is hot, and it tastes the way it did last time.

That „the way it did last time" is the point where most kitchens fail. Which is why here we weigh and write down what our grandmothers described as „a handful" and „until it is right". Not to make it more sterile — but so that the bigos in March is the same as the one in November.

That fits with how rarely our menu turns over. The standing menu changes once every two years, with two seasonal menus alongside. So we chase no trends. We have a manageable number of dishes and quite a lot of time to make them better.

The rest follows from the room. Posters hang on our walls, Polish jazz or classical music plays, and sometimes a black-and-white film runs silently along the wall. Guests keep telling us two sentences: „like at home" and „like at grandma's". Both are meant as compliments, and we take them that way.

We are at Karmeliterplatz 1 in Leopoldstadt; the current opening hours are at the bottom of every page. You cannot have this delivered, and you cannot order it online either — a soup people are supposed to argue about belongs on a table with people around it anyway. What is on offer right now is in the menu.

And if you cannot decide: take the beef broth. But do not tell anyone, we would rather keep it to ourselves a while longer.

Now let us talk tachles.