She makes gefilte fish from her grandmother’s recipes, bakes her own matzah and feeds the citizens of Lublin and visitors to the Polish city with kreplach, chopped liver and delicious salt beef. But although the menu at her restaurant Mandragora is Jewish, chef-patron Izabela Kozlowska-Dechnik is not. And yet it remains her mission to preserve the dishes of the Jews who once lived there.
Almost the entire Jewish population of Lublin, 95 miles southeast of Warsaw, was wiped out during the Shoah. Among the 40,000 Jews who were murdered were the two families who co-owned the 16th century building which now houses the restaurant. Mandragora is full of Jewish flavour This year Mandragora, which takes its name from the Bible’s Song of Songs, celebrating the mandrake as a symbol of love, fertility and happiness, will have been open for 20 years.
Kozlowska-Dechnik says she grew up eating Jewish food: “It was the cuisine I knew as a child, and the food of my city as well as of my friends of Jewish origin.” She runs the restaurant with her husband Kamil, who also isn’t Jewish but who lived in Israel for 18 years. “We get a lot of visitors from Israel, and it helps that Kamil speaks fluent Hebrew,” says the chef who, over the years, has supplemented the Ashkenazi dishes of her childhood with Sephardi and Middle Eastern favourites, including malabi.
Malabi is on the menu “My grandfather managed a restaurant, my aunt ran a cafe where my grandmother worked in the kitchen an.