Bartosz Szymczak

Coming Up

Le Cordon Bleu sits at the start of Bartosz Szymczak’s professional line, followed by London kitchens where the work moved through Bleeding Heart, Arbutus, The Cow, and Typing Room. Born in Gdynia, Poland, Szymczak carries that route back into a Polish kitchen vocabulary through Creative Modern Polish cuisine. The point is not novelty for its own sake; it is a way of working with flavours already known, then re-ordered through experience abroad.

Where They Are Now

Since 2016, Bartosz Szymczak has been Head Chef at Rozbrat 20 in Warsaw, Poland, while also serving there as co-owner. The role places management and cooking in the same hands, with the restaurant standing as the current form of a career shaped between Polish roots and London service. Creative Modern Polish cuisine is the label attached to that work, but the method underneath is straightforward: respect the product, then apply modern technique without losing the frame of the cuisine. Szymczak states the principle directly: “We play with the product, but treat it with the greatest respect.” That line of thinking keeps the cooking tied to lineage. It is not a rejection of Polish cuisine and not a fixed historical version of it either; it is a kitchen practice built on known flavours, carried by someone who earned each step across different rooms and different demands.

In Their Words “I don't discover anything new now; sometimes I bring back something that has been forgotten.” “For me, Polish cuisine is cooking and building on flavours that I know.”

Honors

The formal marker in Szymczak’s record is Le Cordon Bleu, the training that opens the path into London and then back to Warsaw. His key career recognition is the 2016 move into Head Chef at Rozbrat 20, where the same experience now sits under both leadership and ownership. No separate award is listed here. The biography’s recognition is structural: the progression from school to London kitchens to a long-running role in Warsaw, with Rozbrat 20 as the point where that progression becomes visible in one place.