Cocktails & wine

The best drinking in Wrocław is happening inside a restaurant, which is not where anyone tells you to look. BABA makes cocktails at a level that matches the best speakeasy bars — and it does so while running a MICHELIN-starred kitchen in the same room.

That combination is genuinely rare. Most restaurants treat the bar as a holding pen for people waiting on a table. Here it's a second discipline, taken as seriously as the barszcz, in a room with a cool seventies vibe and no shortage of personality.

Not a cocktail bar — a wine list with a person attached to it, which is rarer and more useful. The sommelier hit it exactly right with a superb natural wine, without a tasting-note lecture and without steering me up the price list.

Low light, low hum, the open kitchen in view. It's the kind of place where one glass turns into staying all evening, which is the only review a wine bar really needs.

The obvious place to explore good wine without any nonsense. The staff let me taste several different bottles before I committed — a small courtesy that almost nowhere bothers with, and it changes the entire evening.

Informal, unaffected, and built for sitting a while with charcuterie and bread in front of you. Go when you want wine to be uncomplicated.

The liquid side of the menu here deserves its own praise, separate from the kitchen. The Espresso Martinis were excellent — properly made, not the sweet, flat version you get almost everywhere else.

But the thing worth crossing town for is the homemade plum shots. They add a brilliant, authentic touch to the evening and they're exactly the kind of detail that gives a place a real sense of its own culture, instead of a drinks list copied from somewhere else.

A cautionary entry rather than a recommendation. The drinks themselves aren't the problem — the handling of them is. Our pre-dinner cocktails arrived after the food, the wine was delayed, and the staff missed every opportunity to guide us through a proper pairing.

In a room this ambitious, that's the difference between a drinks programme and a list of drinks. If you go, order at the bar before you sit down.

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