Bawelna

We have been rather excited about the prospect of visiting Bawełna, one of the recent shooting stars on the restaurant map of Łódź. It held a lot of promise — stylishly renovated interiors of the old fabric factory (Bawełna means Cotton in Polish), with a supposedly well designed menu etc. Hence, taking advantage of being in Łódź for New Year, we decided to come and pay it a visit. The result made us feel rather ambivalent, to say the least.
The whole visit started rather unassumingly. We (5 adults and 2 children) had made a reservation for a table for 7. There was a six-​person table prepared for us, but one of waiters quickly procured another chair, which sort of worked, albeit made the table a little cramped.
It took about a quarter for anyone to come and take our orders and another ten minutes for us to get our drinks (predominantly tap water, which they charge for). The first course (soups + two appetizers) came staggered — foccacia with spreads arrived together with the baked, parma-​ham-​wrapped mozarella. The former was nice, with crispy, flavorsome bread and interesting spreads (my favorite one was the liver pâté). The latter was rather greasy and not particularly appealing, though one could tell that ingredients used to produce the dish were of a good quality. The most unappetizing part of this meal was the bread, which was very hard and dense.
After two of us have finished the appetizers, we got three of the five soups. Spicy fish soup, which was OK, I hear. The boullion with noodles found approval with kids. The other two guests (who have not eaten anything yet, though it was already 50 minutes into the meal) were told that the kitchen has «ran out of boullion», which we felt was a rather unwelcome surprise. In the end, these guests have decided to skip the first course in favor of the second.
Generally, second course was passable. Vitello tonnato was fine, though slightly underseasoned. The side potatoes were very obviously reheated from the previous day (none of us found them particularly tasty), but the garden salad was fresh and properly dressed.
The gnocchi were tasty, though very greasy and the side sauce was quite mild, if not underseasoned.
Kids’ pasta bolognese was supposedly good (at least kids enjoyed it), though it weirdly came dressed with some green olives. I don’t think that the ragout was particularly well prepared…
My Straccetti di Filetto would be a highlight of the meal, if not for a few major issues. First and foremost it was incredibly peppery — I am not averse to some spice in my food, but the amount of black pepper in this dish seriously overpowered other flavors. The tenderloin was tender and not overcooked and I enjoyed it immensely. I would have enjoyed it more if there was more of it. At least 50% of the larger morsels in the dish were actually roasted button mushrooms. The sauce had nice flavors of trouffle oil, port and tomatos and it was truly interesting. The whole dish was served with the same, underwhelming bread as the mozarella starter.
Overall, we have been very disappointed in our visit, as we had to wait for food longer than we anticipated and food was at best barely passable (with too many glaring mistakes). We have decided to cut the meal short and skip the dessert. We heard from the other tables, that the food was signifcantly below the usual par and that the stale, hard bread I was unhappy about is usually a highlight of the meal.
I really hope that our unfortunate experience was just a one-​of, but judging from today’s visit, I would recommend you to think twice before coming to Bawełna, hoping to get a good meal…