The Brenfleck family have been connoisseurs of Polish dishes for generations.
Chef Michael Brenfleck’s grandfather, Walter Bubick, was the very best at creating sumptuous, homey Polish meals filled with pierogi, kielbaba and sourdough rye bread. So it is only fitting that Brenfleck named his first self-owned restaurant and bar, Little Walter’s in East Kensington, after the family’s patriarch.
“What inspired me to do this food is eating this with my family, most particularly on Christmas Eve with “Wiglia” that night’s traditional supper, and stuff that my mom would cook,” says Brenfleck, who fills the E. Hagert Street spot with happy, homespun traditions and contemporary twists on Polish cuisine. “There was always kielbasa in house, Walter’s house to be exact — my mother’s father — and cooked by my Aunts Anna and Millie.”
As a chef, Brenfleck is known for his work as Executive Chef at Rittenhouse’s Spice Finch and its Mediterranean fare. However, cooking Polish cuisine has always been in his blood.
“Every cuisine that I have done has broadened my horizons. I bring all of that back into my true passion – Polish food – and that shows up in Little Walter’s menu,” he said. “At times, when I was younger, I thought I knew everything. Now I think I do Polish food more like I tasted in the past than I ever imagined I would.”
Locating Little Walter’s in East Kensington puts Brenfleck in the heart of the Port Richmond-Bridesburg neighborhood where Polish families have lived for generations, and “leads deeper into the authenticity” of where this food lives.
Brenfleck’s opening menu for Little Walter’s is filled with tradition at “the heart of every dish, with each item having a Polish word in its title,” along with the chef’s flair for invention coming in exciting new ways. “I don’t want to bruise the tradition, overdo it or make something unrecognizable, but I like making tweaks to make it more refined, and approachable. Then again, Polish food is always very approachable.”
With these contempo tweaks, Brenfleck promises that items such as Pierogi Ruskie with house pickles and Pilsudski mustard, the Kielbasa of pork shoulder, coriander and marjoram, Kotlet z Kurczaka chicken cutlet, Wieprzowina z Rożna rotisserie pork and Chleb (sourdough rye with dill butter and smalec), “will be just like what you’ve had in Poland or in your family’s dining room. That comes down to the fact that we make everything in house, including our pickles. There’s not a ton of fancy culinary things. We just make it homey.”
Where Little Walter’s goes truly wild is in its cocktail, native craft drinks titled for jobs in Polish, while utilizing spirits and liqueurs native to Poland.
“We started with Nauczyciel, which means “teacher” in Polish, because it sounds cool, and we did an apple pie cocktail to go with it featuring bison grass vodka, krupnick (a honey spicy liqueur) and apple kambucha from Olga’s,” says the chef.
And to go with the traditions-plus of Little Walter’s, Brenfleck went for a homey décor that “felt old, but not too old,” with wood tones, exposed brick and a color scheme that is warm and inviting, with all of its tables “being made from the same tree,” he says. With such a strong solid root as that, Little Walter’s can branch off and go anywhere that Chef Michael Brenfleck chooses.
