Bistro Renoma

It all started a Saturday noon looking for a place for brunch. Realizing the places in the area had a waiting line we felt lucky to find a table at this bistro.
Service was friendly and attentive. Despair the language barrier they made their best to explained us the menu and dishes of the day.
The signature of this place is the gluten free menu and organic ingredients. A big win if you have dietary restrictions.
Soya cappuccino was a BIG win, creamy and tasty. Strongly recommend the quinoa salad with warm beats and goat cheese. Bread is crusty and if you are lucky still warm!
Because food is freshly made with local ingredients you may encounter lack of dishes. In our case the soup of the day was finished (potato leek cream) and there was no feta cheese for the Greek watermelon salad. So perhaps is best to come with a flexible mentality of what you would like to order.
Nevertheless, the attitude, taste of dishes and excellent coffee still deserves a four stars!

Chic bistro near BUW. The menu is short, but sweet, with great options for celiacs. Their smoothies are interesting and very flavorful. Friendly service in several languages. Soothing ambience and music.
Stumbled in by accident the first time and was so impressed that we returned two days later. Was served the best steak I’ve had in recent memory.

The real problem with this place was the lack of pizzazz for the price of pizzazz. A cute bistro place near the BUW, with an inviting atmosphere — houndstooth tile on the bar /​bottles of wine /​soft lighting — it seems like a nice intimate place for a nice dinner and a date. However, the food is so unispiring that if Michalanglo ate it the Sistine never would have happened. It’s a restaurant that makes you feel guilty for eating out.
The menu was sparse — which isn’t a bad thing in Warsaw. Usually, the nicer the place and the less items on the menu, the better the food. You can kind of assume that the chef makes a special effort to prepare a few dishes that she’s got a talent for. BUT — while the food at Renoma is both high quality and prepared properly, it is bland, unimaginative, and finally insulting due to the price/​quality ratio. Of course I understand paying more for good meat and not much has to be done to it –but when you make me pay exorbitant prices for unimaginative vegetbles? What do I look like? An affluent hare? A poshy Bambi?
The Soup: On the menu it just says that you can get a soup made from whatever vegetables are in season at the time. We got some sort of «white vegetable soup» which was actually green. Now the soup wasn’t bad — it was just unremarkable. It had a delicate sweet flavor, but it tasted like nothing — it was garnished with a bit of spring onions and oil. I finally had to get up and take the pepper from another table in order to finish eating it. It was a dish that the whole time you try to eat it you think about what you could do to it to make it taste better — lemon juice /​crushed garlic /​pepper /​a bit of cream /​truffles /​croutons — and you sit there and then make combinations — crushed garlic with a bit of cream AND croutons.
All the while cheesy, horrible saxophone music is playing ala «What a Wonderful World» and «Careless Whisper». They overdim the lights, and the waiter, who’s hi-​jacked your coat, makes it impossible to escape after a soup that makes you want to quit your day job and start catering because you could obviously do it better.
The appetizer and the Wine — we got some grilled vegetables with cheese — now why does this sound good and it’s ok to pay 20 zlty? THE CHEESE. When this dish came out, it was grilled vegetables with less cheese than the saxophone music. It looked like someone had sneezed flakes of cheese onto the plate. There was so little cheese that when I actually got one of the specks in my mouth I couldn’t even tell what kind it was. So there were red peppers, and paper cutouts of vegetables — zucchini, something white with no flavor — as if a vampiric vegetarian had drained it of its essence first, a potato (yes one), and I think that was it. Don’t be stingy with the cheese. No one WANTS to eat vegetables — you tricksy sneaky tricksters — advertising cheese and then making bank on cheap vegetables. TRICKSY! Thank god I had wine.
The Entre — Grilled free-​range chicken and potato medallions + a mix of salad. This souns good — it’s so basic you can’t really mess it up. Number 1 problem — this cost about 40 zlty — the potatos were 7 and the salad 8 by itself, the Chicken was about 26. It was the cheapest thing on the menu. Fish was 39, Pork was about 40 – 50 and Beef was 70 – 90 with one 119 zlty USA steak option. So we got the happy, frolicking chicken. Of course it was just very dry, grilled happy chicken with nothing — the potatos were just fried poatos with nothing and the salad — 8 zlty (more than the potatos) was some lettuce with OIL for 8 ZLTY. A complete and total rip off. The meat was high quality and I like happy chickens — but don’t make me pay when you’ve done nothing that I can’t do in my own kitchen 10 times better — and DO NOT give me lettuce with oil and charge me 8 zlty. AT LEAST put Balsamico on it — don’t make me do it myself. — Which they did.
Then the service — the guy who was our waiter wasn’t bad, but he was a bit —-sleazy. The owner was in the restaruant, and the waiter was paying particularly good /​almost simpering attention to her and was kind of allowing us to fend for ourselves in terms of having to loot the other tables for much needed condiments. The food itslef wasn’t served with anything. We had to drown everything in Balsamico and wine by the end of the night, and then when the bill came it made us want to cry in shame — because obviously this could have been made at home for much cheaper with much better results. I hate nothing more than feeling gulity for eating at a restaurant, and of course I will never go back to a restaurant that makes me feel like that.
Like a lot of places in Warsaw at the moment, this place seems to suffer from an identity crisis. It seems like something that a bored housewife threw together. There is no concept, no idea, no cohesion and no focus on the menu. It’s just food thrown on a trendy board, and it misses the mark.