Restauracja Stylowa

When Restauracja Stylowa opened in Nowa Huta on July 22, 1956, it became one of only two places in Poland’s model socialist city where you could sip cognac to live piano music, the other being the now-vanished Arkadia across the square. But its most enduring nickname came decades later: after someone bombed Lenin’s statue across the street in 1979, managing only to damage the dictator’s heel, locals rechristened it “the bar beneath the lame leg.” The monument’s gone now, but the restaurant remains.

The date wasn’t an accident. July 22 was communist Poland’s national holiday, marking the anniversary of the 1944 manifesto that founded the regime, which meant Stylowa opened its doors on the one day of the year custom-built for toasting the future. Locals treated the statue across the street with less reverence than the calendar suggested they should. Regulars used to joke that Lenin was on his nightly commute from Stylowa to Arkadia, cap tucked behind his back, and currency traders working the restaurant would occasionally pay a waiter to march a pork cutlet out to him as a gag. Whoever planted the explosive in 1979 was never identified, and the blast that shattered windows across the block still only managed to clip one heel. The statue came down for good a decade later. The nickname, somehow, is the part that stuck.