A lot has changed over the years since communism got kneecapped and Poland joined the EU. Today a destination as popular as Poland hardly seems any more alien or adventurous to tourists than well-frequented France or Italy. And while many of the old ways of the old days have disappeared or become slightly disneyfied, one relic remains steadfastly un-Western: the Polish milk bar.

These steamy cafeterias serving traditional cuisine to an endless queue of tramps, pensioners and students provide a grim glimpse into Eastern Bloc Poland and have all the atmosphere (and sanitary standards) of a gas station restroom. We love them. For the cost of a few coins you can eat like an orphaned street urchin, albeit an extremely well-fed one. Put the museums on hold, a visit to the milk bar (‘bar mleczny’ in Polish) is a required cultural experience for anyone who has just set foot in the country.

Poland’s first milk bar - ‘Pod Bańką’ (Under the Milk Churn) - was opened on Kraków’s market square on May 30th, 1948. Originally no hot dishes were served; bar mleczny were places where you went simply to enjoy milk (hence the name), humbly served in .25 litre glass with a straw (so classy). Run by the government, this was the new party’s ‘clever’ attempt at popularising milk-drinking (as opposed to moonshine), inspired by Poland’s large surplus of dairy products. As restaurants were nationalised and then shut down by PL’s communist authorities, more and more milk bars appeared across the country and began offering cheap, dairy-based meals to the masses and especially workers; quite often meals at the local milk bar were included in a worker’s salary.

By the mid-60s milk bars were widely prevalent across Poland as the party concept was to provide cheap, fast food to everyone (as cheerlessly as possible apparently). In addition to milk, yoghurt, cottage cheese and other dairy concoctions, milk bars offered omelettes and egg cutlets, as well as flour-based foods like pierogi. Times were so desperate under communism that many bar mleczny resorted to chaining the cutlery to the table to deter rampant thievery; by this same reasoning you’ll still notice today that most milk bars use disposable dishes and the salt and pepper are dispensed from plastic cups with a spoon. Similarly, the orders are still taken by blue-haired, blue-veined, all-business babcias -and the food is as inspired as ever, the only difference being meat isn’t rationed any more in modern PL. Indeed, today’s milk bars evoke a timelessness to be savoured just as the milk soup with noodles served to schoolchildren in PL in the 1980s was. With the collapse of communism most bar mleczny went bankrupt, however, fortunately for us all, some of these feed museums were saved and continue to be kept open and dirt cheap through state subsidies. The range of available dishes begins to fall off as closing time approaches, so go early, go often.