Royal Warsaw, Elmwood Park – Review

by Alice Magdziak • October 4, 2013 • Bergen, Food, Various and Sundry • Comments (0) • 2941

Restaurants specializing in Polish food tend to be storefront shops with little Polish grandmas serving you their pierogies and kielbasa. Royal Warsaw is an entirely different experience. Trendy dining rooms, big menu of Polish and American dishes. This is a date night restaurant for delicious Polish comfort food.

Meat, cheese, potato, sauerkraut and fruit pierogies can all be found on the menu. There are appetizer plates and entree plates of the delicious pillowy dumplings. We’ve been to quite a few Polish restaurants and these are the best pierogies we’ve found. How can something with both pasta and potato be so light and fluffy? They’re amazing. You can get them pan fried, boiled or deep fried.

It’s hard to try anything other than the delicious Polish menu items but we did squeeze some calamari in. The appetizer was nice and fresh and came with a Thai chili sauce and marinara. At least one of the sauces could have been a little spicier but that’s just my personal preference.

Of course, we can’t talk about a Polish menu without seeing what the stuffed cabbage rolls are like. Royal Warsaw’s golabki with tomato sauce were so tender that they instantly melted in my mouth. The stuffing was chock full of well-seasoned pork and the tomato sauce was a prefect blend of fruity sweet tomato and a little peppery seasoning. I could eat these every week.

Finally, we tried schabowy with mushroom stuffing. This was a breaded pork cutlet stuffed with mushrooms, onions and cheese. The stuffing was really flavorful and not over-stuffed. I rarely get stuffed items because I don’t like when the item falls apart when you cut into it. This pork cutlet didn’t fall apart at all. Exactly what I want! The breading was light and crispy, too. Even the mashed potatoes were great—creamy and rich.

Fall is officially here and that means comfort food so head over to Elmwood Park and try Royal Warsaw! There are many more Polish dishes that we want to get back and try. Bigos (a meat stew with sauerkraut) is on the menu along with Plate ala Warsaw which is a sampler including stuffed cabbage, Polish sausage, pierogies and bigos.

The wait staff was extremely attentive—we never had to ask for a drink refill, they were always on top of that. Wednesday night is karaoke night which sounds really fun.