Baczewski
Restauracja

About Baczewski Restauracja

To understand Baczewski Restauracja, you must first understand the family whose name it carries. In 1782, J.A. Baczewski established one of Europe's first commercial horilka distilleries in Lviv, exporting Ukrainian spirits across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and beyond. Their liqueurs won medals at international fairs. They supplied the Viennese court. And then, like so much of Lviv's Jewish-Polish-Ukrainian history, the family and their enterprise were destroyed by the Second World War. What stands on Shevska Street today is both a restaurant and an act of cultural restoration — a deliberate, beautiful reclamation of what was lost.

The restaurant occupies three floors of a historic building, each with its own character. The ground-floor bar is animated and social, a place of cocktails and liqueur flights. The upper floors become progressively more intimate. But the centrepiece — and the reason Baczewski consistently tops every Lviv dining list — is the greenhouse main hall: a soaring conservatory room filled with tropical greenery, singing canaries, and the soft pulse of a pianist or harpist. It is one of the most extraordinary dining rooms in Eastern Europe.

Chef Aleksander Chernyshenko's kitchen operates under what he calls "new Galician cuisine" — original recipes collected from old Lviv families, reinterpreted through modern technique. Halasle soup (a Hungarian-Galician fish broth that arrived via the Transylvanian border), Lviv-style gefilte fish, chicken necks with cymes, lazanka pasta with braised duck — these are dishes that carry centuries in their flavour. The cherry meringue, built on techniques that travelled from Vienna in the 1890s, is not to be missed. The all-you-can-eat weekend breakfast with live piano is one of the city's great social rituals, and the terrace and veranda expand the capacity considerably in warmer months.

The liqueur selection deserves its own paragraph. Yuriy Pidvirny, the restaurant's in-house liqueur master, maintains over 100 original recipes — apricot, walnut, caraway, elderflower, seasonal berry. These are not tourist traps. They are expressions of a pre-war Ukrainian craft tradition, served in proper glasses with proper intention. A tasting flight here is a more interesting education than most wine lists in Western Europe. A shop on the premises lets you take your favourites home.