Cucina

Recipes carried to the open kitchen

Recipes reach the open kitchen before the room fills. At Cucina in Poznań, Poland, the pass sits in the same field of attention as the tables, and the oven sets the terms. Executive chef Bogumił Przybylak leads the kitchen, and the brief that drew Michelin inspectors to the 2024 guide is plain enough: the best products, turned into compositions that stay simple and stay in memory. That is not nostalgia. It is repetition, order, and the daily correction that happens when a recipe has to survive service.

The kitchen is credited as a team rather than a single hand, named in the house's own words as Zespół Cucina 88 and working under owner Wiesław Jan Prusiecki. At Cucina, that discipline meets a modern Italian and Mediterranean brief, with pizza, seasonal plates, pasta, beef tartare, roast duck, desserts from the patisserie, and a curated wine program moving through the same service. The recipe has to hold. The guest has to feel the hand behind it.

Oakwood, thin dough, seasonal plates

The oven is the station that organizes Cucina. Fired with oakwood, it gives the kitchen its Italian center and sends thin-crust pizzas to the table with the aroma of the fuel still attached. The dough is not treated as a decorative platform; it carries olives, selected ingredients, and the heat of a real fire. Around it, the kitchen widens into the Mediterranean: fresh seasonal produce, pastas, tartare, roast duck, and plates built for an à la carte rhythm rather than a fixed procession.

The method here depends on restraint. Cucina's stated approach favors simple compositions from high-quality products, with the menu shifting as ingredients allow. Pizza can be casual; it can also expose a kitchen quickly. Dough, fire, timing, and topping all announce themselves before the plate reaches the table. In the open kitchen, there is little room to hide the pass, which is the point of putting it in the room.

The room around the pass

Cucina sits within the City Park complex at ul. Stanisława Wyspiańskiego, in a historic environment that has been refurbished into a clean, modern room. The atmosphere is polished but not stiff. Guests see the kitchen working, and that visibility changes the meal: the bench, the oven, and the pass sit inside the same field of attention as the tables. Conversation can stay at the table because the room runs at a conversational pitch.

The wine shop and curated list extend the craft beyond the stove without pulling focus from it. Bottles are chosen to sit with pizza, duck, tartare, and the broader Mediterranean plates, while the patisserie gives the kitchen another register of patience. The place feels most itself when those elements stay in proportion: oakwood heat, seasonal produce, wine, pastry, and the cook at the station. End on the oven, because Cucina's clearest signature is still the oakwood-fired pizza from the open kitchen.