Following the closure of Hungarian restaurant the Gay Hussar in 2018 – that Soho institution and virtual museum of Labour party history – it seems Londoners are about to lose another Central European landmark. The Polish restaurant Daquise has finally had time served on it by Transport for London, who wish to redevelop the buildings round South Kensington station, where Daquise has been serving its loyal customers for nearly 80 years.
Formerly a wartime canteen for Polish officers, Daquise opened as a restaurant in 1947. Even its name is rather romantic – a portmanteau word put together by the restaurant’s uxorious founder (he was Dakowski, his wife Louise, therefore Daquise). Its period of high summer, current manager Tadeusz Dembinski tells me, was in the decade or so after the war, when Poles flooded into south-west-central London, and the area from South Ken to Earl’s Court was known as the ‘Polish Corridor’ (later, with families, they moved out to Ealing and Hammersmith).
As with the lost Gay Hussar, Daquise has legends attached to it: call girl Christine Keeler dined there with her lover Yevgeny Ivanov – naval attaché at the Soviet embassy – just before the Profumo scandal broke. Film director Roman Polanski took time off from directing Repulsion to load up here on pierogi and Żurek soup, while Count Edward Raczyński, President of the Polish government-in-exile from 1979–86, is said to have used Daquise as his unofficial headquarters. There are bullet holes in the wall, Tadeusz tells me, rumoured to come from a duel two Poles fought over an English woman they were both in love with (a more prosaic explanation, he confesses, puts it down to damage from building works).
Though there are mutterings about reopening Daquise on other premises, the restaurant and South Kensington always seemed to enjoy a strange symbiosis. Back in the 1990s – when I discovered Daquise – South Ken was a discreet and elegant area, a calm backwater full of London landmarks, some of which have gone now.
There was a Waterstone’s on Old Brompton Road (closed in 2007) with sofas to sit on while you browsed, and a little further on the Gloucester Road bookshop (still there) run by Graham Greene’s nephew, a shop whose constantly changing window displays were works of art. Bute Street had, then as now, all the French shops – including a splendid rotisserie, I remember, that sold nothing but roast chicken and dauphinoise potatoes – and the Lumiere Cinema, one of the quirkier of London’s screens, housed at the French institute.
There is the music store Kensington Chimes – selling metronomes and cello strings – on Harrington Road, and just a few streets away, till 2006, there was the Webber Douglas acting school with its tiny Chanticleer theatre (now demolished and sold for flats). The V&A, bomb-scarred from the war, is nearby, and if you’re prepared to walk through a series of long tunnels at the tube station, so are the Science and Natural History museums, the latter with its Diplodocus skeleton cast, there since 1905 (but removed in 2017).
There was something terribly English about South Kensington. The area wasn’t Sloane or boho-hip like Chelsea, or frantically commercial like Knightsbridge. It was reserved and slightly understated, and right at the centre of it, next to a shop selling books and expensive greetings cards, was Daquise – a meeting place which seemed to tie all these things together and that you couldn’t really imagine South Ken without.
Daquise went through several renovations in its time and I knew it best in its beige, linoleum and formica period – a kind of late communist style – when we called it ‘Café Daquise’ and it felt pleasantly lived-in and relaxing. You went there for comfort food – borscht, potato pancakes and pecan pie, all of which cheered you up. There was a lot of warm 1970s plywood panelling about, with long vinyl banquettes and Christmassy artworks on the wall, which made you feel, along with its moustached owner Zygmunt Lozinski and Central European waitresses, that you’d come home and found a refuge.
Through the years there have been numerous death scares for Daquise (I part-organised a petition against its closure in 1996)
You saw elderly Poles in there buying their grandchildren hot chocolate and Polish cheesecake, museum visitors rounding off a day of culture, the odd, lonely writer scribbling in a notebook or, as the late author Angela Lambert pointed out, couples ‘visibly falling in love’. Going there was a bit like being in a novel – you wondered, looking round at fellow diners, about their back-stories, about who they were.
Then came its refit in 2009, following a fire. Gone was that lovably down-at-heel atmosphere. In its place was a colder establishment – with tiled walls and stripped floors, playing a mixture of Chopin and jazz – far less fun to be in, but with much better food. I myself reviewed it favourably in 2014: gone were the potato pancakes and pecan pie, but in its place were things like Polish stuffed eggs (mashed up and served hot in their shells, dripping in butter) and, that day at least, venison medallions in wine sauce, complete with the Christmassy smells of cinnamon and nutmeg. Regulars clung on, even if Daquise was very much a restaurant rather than a café by then. Its current customers, I’m told, include Hugh Grant, Mark Rylance and Jonathan Aitken (even Spanish film star Penélope Cruz has been known to drop in when in town).
Through the years there have been numerous death scares for Daquise (I part-organised a petition against its closure in 1996) before each time it went into remission. Now, it seems, TfL really mean business; they have the planning permission to redevelop the buildings, and are muttering about ‘new jobs and homes’ and improved ‘step-free access’ to the station. Daquise has till the end of the year, Tadeusz tells me, but not much longer, and he himself is planning to retire to his native Warsaw. He’s been inundated with customers expressing their sadness, telling him that they’ve been coming to Daquise since childhood, and will feel its loss. There hasn’t been such an outpouring of love, he tells me, since Brexit, when diners the next day hugged the Polish staff and reassured them it was nothing personal.
Meanwhile, we ought to remember, amid the mourning, the other excellent Polish restaurants in London: among them, the Łowiczanka restaurant at Hammersmith’s Polish Cultural Centre, or Ognisko on Exhibition Road, or the Folk House Zakopane near Turnpike Lane – and use them while we can. As for Daquise, we should perhaps reflect stoically on that old Polish saying – Co się stało, to się nie odstanie – ‘What’s happened cannot unhappen.’ Or, as we might put it more colloquially, ‘There’s no point crying over spilt Żubrówka.’
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