Polish Dining Returns to Milwaukee

Wioletta’s Polish Kitchen (7135 S.13th St., Oak Creek) serves a full Polish menu complete with pirogis, hunters stew, stuffed cabbage and, of course Polish sausage.

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Through the last century and into the ‘90s, Milwaukee was home to several restaurants that proudly maintained the heritage of the city’s Polish immigrants, who in the years before World War I settled in large numbers on the South Side. Since the ‘90s, the ranks of Polish restaurants thinned, culminating in the 2022 closing of Polonez in St. Francis.

Earlier this year, the gap was finally filled. Wioletta’s Polish Kitchen (7135 S.13th St., Oak Creek) serves a full Polish menu complete with pirogis, hunters stew, stuffed cabbage and of course, Polish sausage. The restaurant is on the same long block as the Marcus South Shore Cinema, set back from the road behind an ample parking lot in a space once occupied by an Arbee’s. Owners Adam and Wioletta Bartoszek, with children Samantha and Oliver, have succeed in restoring Poland’s hearty cuisine to Milwaukee’s restaurant culture.

The interior is painted in restful shades and hung with family portraits, Polish scenes and a big back-lit map of Poland with a jigsaw of provinces clearly delineated. A large bar sits among the multi-leveled room, stocked with Polish beer and serving specialty cocktails. It’s a comfortable room.

Sampler Plate

The Polish plate ($25) is an opportunity to sample much of what’s on the menu. The crowded platter includes Polish sausage, ribs with gravy, a meat pierogi, the potato of the day (including mashed potatoes from scratch, like most everything at Wioletta’s) and portions of hunters stew and red cabbage salad. For a narrower but no less filling focus on Polish culinary traditions, try the pierogi sampler plate ($19) with a dozen pillowy pierogis stuffed with choices of cheese and potato, mushroom and sauerkraut and pork and served with a ham-onion mélange adding salt and texture.

Among the other entrees are the Polish meatball ($18), tender beef goulash with potato pancakes ($25), breaded pork chop with potato of the day of red cabbage ($19), and stuffed cabbage with a cheese pierogi on the side ($18). Entrees come with crusty dinner rolls and choice of soup or salad. The salads are standard restaurant fare, but the soups are superb with a changing lineup that can include comforting chicken noodle and creamy mushroom or dill and rice. The entrees are attractively presented and served by unfailingly friendly, even cheerful staff.

Wioletta’s Polish Kitchen grew out of Wioletta’s Polish Market (3955 S. Howell Ave.). The store has that old fashioned, meaty grocery aroma and is pleasantly retro. The room is scaled like a shop, not a warehouse, and you actually have to pay a human on the way out. Although relatively compact, the market stocks an enormous variety: fresh baked bakery (including that Polish favorite, paczki), a frozen section (pierogis, dumplings), a refrigerated wall with take-outs to go (soups include czarnina, barley and borscht), ample varieties of herring and mackerel, a liquor section filled with vodka, beer and liqueurs—even Polish goods such as bottled mayonnaise and juice. That meat counter features ham, Polish sausage, rolled bacon, hard salami and more.

The two Wioletta’s are a welcome throwback to a time when Milwaukee was one of North America’s thriving outposts of Polonia.