After centuries of wars and decades of communism, the Polish capital is getting its groove back—fast. Guy Martin catches the spirit

Paweł Luwau and I saunter in the wake of a tourist phalanx up ulica Świętojańska, toward the Market Square of Warsaw's Old Town. Unlike the crowd, most of which will be plowing into ice-cream parlors, pubs, and cafés, Paweł and I have a different plan: We're going to eat some cheap tinned meats in gelatin, preparations we could define as bastard cousins to pâté but, out of respect for the real thing, probably should not. We are going to eat these items on the no-frills cafeteria side of the restaurant Bazyliszek. The culinary implications of the name are unclear but ominous: A basilisk is the serpentine dragon whose glance can turn a man to stone.

This is a sentimental errand. Back in the sixties, Paweł used to go to Bazyliszek's cafeteria on Sundays with his mother. It's Sunday. We know the food will be retro socialist realist—that's the point. What with the refined Polish and international cuisine here nowadays, these sorts of places are thin on the ground. Basically, if we presume that Proust was a Slav who, as a child during the Brezhnev era, became deeply fond of macerated comestibles in tin molds shoved at him by angry old ladies, then Paweł and I are in search of a Proustian moment.

Replaying memories in Warsaw is fraught work. The thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Old Town and its late-fourteenth-century sibling, the New Town, perched on a bluff above the west bank of the Vistula River, form the city's historic core. Prior to World War II, the Old Town and the New Town were predominantly composed of the original medieval houses—with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century structures around the two market squares. The area looks the same today, but in reality these houses are a 1950s stage set, albeit a ferociously accurate one. When the 35,000-strong Warsaw unit of the Armia Krajowa (AK), or Polish Home Army—a secretly trained insurrectionary force of some 350,000 nationwide—opened fire on the German occupiers at 5 p.m. on August 1, 1944, the tiny streets and medieval fortifications of the old city center offered the resistance fighters advantageous terrain. The survivors surrendered after sixty-three days of bloody house-to-house fighting, whereupon Hitler—who just the year before had gotten quite the snoutful of heroic Polish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto—ordered the SS and the Wehrmacht to raze the city. It was extravagantly punitive. The Germans were already on the run; the idea was to make the Polish capital uninhabitable for future generations. Eighty-five percent of Warsaw was blown up. In the Old Town and the New Town, the destruction was nearly total. What Warsaw presents architecturally today, then, is the shards and sediment of several war-torn centuries: Authentic old buildings and those that have been lovingly reproduced live side by side with the Socialist utilitarian and the brand-new.

The cafeteria at Bazyliszek trumps our expectations—Paweł says it's exactly as it was in the sixties. The light through the tinted windows lends us a jaundiced glow, and the harpies behind the vitrine neglect to give him a fork for his jellied carp. They just hand him the tin and repair to the rear.