Filipa 18

Learning the room before leading it

Marcin Sołtys keeps the pass at Filipa 18 in Kraków as Chef, reading the room before he sends out the next plate. His first apprenticeship began at home, watching his father work and learning the value of attention before authority. Institut Paul Bocuse later gave that instinct a frame: technique, discipline, and the standard that a kitchen must hold whether the room is calm or tightening. In Kraków, service tested the method. As chef kuchni at Wierzynek, Sołtys worked in a station where consistency and composure mattered, including service for heads of state and diplomats, a pressure he has described plainly as hard work. At Filipa 18, now Szef Kuchni of Restauracja FILIPA 18, FOOD-WINE-ART, the progression sits close to the hands. Training, service, leadership. He does not lead from a distance here; the room is small enough, and the open kitchen close enough, for timing to become visible.

Market produce through a Polish hand

The method at Filipa 18 starts near the restaurant, at Stary Kleparz, where regional ingredients give the menu its fixed ground. Sołtys works in a modern Polish register with French discipline behind it, shaping familiar materials through smoking, braising, emulsions, house baking, and careful acidity. The menu can move from veal tenderloin tartare with dill mayonnaise, crayfish, beetroot rosette, and Vistula caviar to boar cub shank with green lentils, roasted garlic, and glazed carrot sauce. Cracow style duck carries buckwheat groats, mushrooms, and beetroot rather than a borrowed garnish. A zander fillet may sit with fish fumet, tomato consommé, Polish style lettuce, and a goat cheese donut. The tasting format gives the kitchen a longer line to draw, while the à la carte keeps the work legible course by course. The house has also used pairings and themed dinners as part of its program, including slow food dinners, Hungarian collaboration, and whisky pairings in 2018 and 2019.

Powder blue banquettes and the open pass

The room keeps the scale intimate: powder blue banquettes, bright Polish Poster School artwork, and a small open kitchen that lets the pass sit inside the evening rather than behind it. The noise stays conversational. Plates move through a room that feels closer to a studio than a dining hall, with the counter and the artwork sharing the same field of vision. That matters for this kind of cooking. A beetroot rosette, a line of sauce, a piece of rye bread, the steam from mushroom cappuccino; each arrives with the bench-side evidence still close. The hotel setting gives the house a frame, but the work belongs to the kitchen.

A Kraków address with its own discipline

Recognition has followed the house without becoming the subject of it: Filipa 18 carries a Michelin Guide mention in 2023, and Sołtys is a Złoty Ślimak Slow Food Polska V laureate. Those facts sit best beside the slower measures, the market run, the open pass, the house-baked bread, the patience to keep Polish ingredients in their own grammar. If the room has a final note, it is not polish for its own sake; it is the steady return to Stary Kleparz and to Cracow style duck.