Verified in 2 cities.
Zapiekanka is a signature dish of Poland; we have verified places to eat it in Kraków and Wrocław.
Zapiekanka is the open-face baguette Kraków built into a late-night ritual: half a long roll, layered with mushroom, cheese and ham, grilled until the cheese melts, finished with ketchup and garlic sauce.
Zapiekanka emerged in 1970s Poland as a cheap street-food adaptation of French bread pizza. The Plac Nowy rotunda in Kraków's Kazimierz, originally a 19th-century kosher poultry slaughterhouse called the Okraglak (the round), reopened as a zapiekanka cluster in 1989 after the Iron Curtain fell. Six windows ring the building; Endzior is the consensus pick. The dish features in every Kraków guidebook since the 1990s. The half-metre version (60 cm long) is the post-bar order; the regular 30 cm version is the standard.
Where to eat in Kraków:
Where to eat Zapiekanka in Kraków: the editor picks
Poland's open-faced street pizza: a long French-style baguette halved lengthways, topped with fried mushrooms, melted cheese, ketchup and chopped parsley, baked under a salamander until the cheese bubbles.
The zapiekanka was invented in 1970s Poland as a cheap way to feed cities during food shortages of the late communist era. The original was a piece of stale baguette, topped with mushrooms and processed cheese, finished with sweet tomato ketchup (an exotic Western import at the time). The dish exploded across Polish university cities through the 1980s as the standard drunken late-night food and became iconically associated with Krakow's Plac Nowy Round House, Wrocław's late-night strips and Warsaw's bus-station kiosks. The simple version is sold from windows everywhere in the centre after midnight.
Where to eat in Wrocław:
Where to eat Zapiekanka in Wrocław: the editor picks
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