Café Polonez : Toronto’s 45-Year-Old Polish Institution on Roncesvalles

There are restaurants you go to once. And then there are restaurants you’ve been going to your whole life, that your parents took you to, and that you’ll one day take your own kids to. Café Polonez is the second kind. For 45 years, this Roncesvalles Avenue institution has served Polish home cooking to Toronto, and somewhere along the way it stopped being just a restaurant and became a piece of the neighbourhood itself.

A Family Story That Started in 1981

The story begins with Zygmunt and Irena Zychla, who immigrated to Toronto from Poland in the early 1980s. Irena landed her first job in the kitchen of an existing Polish café on Roncesvalles. When the owner mentioned she was ready to sell, Zygmunt and Irena saw an opportunity. They had sold their business in Poland and brought their savings with them. They put it all into the café, kept the name, and started writing the next chapter.

That was 1981. The torch was eventually passed to their daughter, Sofia Jedynak, who has been at Café Polonez since the very beginning and now leads the operation. The third generation has joined her, with Sofia’s son, Patrick Front, and his sister as co-owners alongside their mother. It’s a family affair in the truest sense, three generations of one Polish family keeping a single Roncesvalles café alive for almost 45 years.

The neighbourhood around them has shifted. Roncesvalles was once the heart of Toronto’s Polish community, and while many of the original families have moved out to the suburbs and most of the Polish-owned businesses have closed, Café Polonez remains. It’s still where Polish families come to celebrate baptisms, communions, and even weddings. It’s also, as Patrick will tell you, where regulars who walked in as children are now bringing their own children. Watching that cycle is part of what keeps them going.

Cozy Over Curated

Café Polonez doesn’t traffic in moodboards or design statements. The room is warm and lived-in, the kind of space where the goal is to sit you down, feed you well, and let you stay as long as you’d like. Cozy is the word Patrick uses, and it fits.

The crowd reflects what Toronto has become. On any given afternoon, you might find a Polish grandmother quietly working through a bowl of soup at one table, and a group of tourists from Japan working through pierogi at the next. That mix didn’t exist when the Zychlas first opened. It’s something they’re proud of now, the way the city has come to share in something that started as a piece of home for one community.

What to Order

The kitchen runs on Polish home cooking, and almost everything is made in-house. The family always pushes the soups first, and for good reason. There’s a daily list, plus seasonal Polish soups that traditionally only appear once a year for Christmas or Easter. Here you can have them any day. That’s the point. Comfort, on demand.

The pierogi are made fresh every day, and they’re a reliable reason to come back. So is the schnitzel, golden and generous, the kind of plate that doesn’t need explaining.

The dish people order more than any other isn’t actually the most obviously Polish thing on the menu. It’s a Hungarian-style potato pancake, a wide, crisp pancake folded around a rich beef goulash. It looks like comfort food and eats like it. Big portion, deep flavour, and the kind of thing that gets requested over and over once you’ve tried it.

Portions throughout the menu lean generous. People leave Café Polonez full, and that’s exactly the contract.

Polish Beer, Polish Vodka, Polish Soul

The drinks list is built around Poland. There’s a strong selection of Polish beers, a small wine list, and a thoughtful range of Polish vodkas and spirits. This isn’t a cocktail destination, and it doesn’t pretend to be. What you’ll get instead is a beer or a glass of vodka that fits the food and the room.

What They’re Most Proud Of

Ask Patrick what he’s proud of and he doesn’t talk about awards or press clippings. He talks about consistency. He talks about regulars who’ve been coming for 30 years. He talks about watching kids grow up in the dining room and then come back as parents themselves. They aren’t chasing the spotlight. They never were.

That’s the quiet thing that makes Café Polonez feel different from almost any other restaurant in the city. It’s not built around a chef’s career, or a concept, or a moment in food culture. It’s built around the people who show up, week after week, decade after decade.

If you’ve never been, you owe yourself a visit. If you’ve been before, you already know.

Written by Fabie Lubin
Photography by Scott Usheroff (Craving Curator)

Updated on May 22, 2026

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