On Locust Street in Columbia, a small restaurant with weathered siding and a mint green awning bears the sign "Café Poland." Walk inside, and you'll be greeted by a Polish woman wearing her signature hairnet and a floral apron with the phrase “happiness is homemade.” Iwona Galijska offers a warm smile and plenty of stories.
This story was completed in collaboration with Vox Magazine's Alex Goldstein. Read more about Café Poland, here.
Iwona ran a restaurant in Poland before she and her family moved to Columbia in 2010. She decided to open a restaurant here to support her family financially.
“We just choose the food from (the) menu in Poland (that) most Polish people like,” she said.
But despite her extensive experience in the restaurant industry, Iwona said she hates to cook.
“My favorite part is the people, not the kitchen,” she said.
Iwona has run Café Poland alongside her son Robert since 2012. He left a few years later to attend medical school in the Caribbean. But in 2019, he postponed his clinical rotations to come back and help at the restaurant—a sabbatical that would stretch on for 5 years.
After more than a decade, Café Poland is moving to new ownership. Iwona said 12 years of running the restaurant has taken a toll on her health — and that it’s time for Robert to finally finish his rotations and become a doctor.
“It’s difficult,” Robert said. “Just only today I start realizing that I’m not going to work here anymore. So, it’s just a strange feeling right now.”
Iwona struggled at first to sell the restaurant and keep the Polish tradition alive, until she found Madison Tasker and Antoine De Los Santos.
“They (were) little bit afraid if they (were) going to catch the taste of the European food, because they were born in a different environment, different kitchen, different culture,” she said. “But I was assuring them, 'I'm going to teach them.' And they said ‘Okay, we're going to try.’”
New owners Tasker and De Los Santos first visited Café Poland in July to eat. They loved Iwona — and the food.
“It’s like the Polish soul food in a sense,” said De Los Santos.
As she did with most customers at the time, Iwona mentioned she was thinking of closing the restaurant. Tasker and De Los Santos approached her days later with an offer to buy it.
The pair originally moved from Las Vegas to Columbia in 2021. Tasker previously worked as a cocktail waitress in Las Vegas. She said Café Poland presents an opportunity to merge her and De Los Santos’ high-end fine dining knowledge with the staples of the restaurant.
“There’s not a lot of places that have that kind of experience,” Tasker said. “And so, this place being so unique was really exciting for us.”
The two spent five months training with Iwona and getting the necessary licenses to take over, while also planning on what changes to make to the restaurant. Tasker and De Los Santos plan on adding more Polish dishes to the menu with crafted Polish-inspired cocktails and offering a late-night limited menu to cater to college students.
But De Los Santos, a certified mixologist, said they’re going to stay true to the original menu.
“We didn’t want to stray away from any of her ingredients or her recipes,” he said. “So, we’re trying to keep everything exactly the same.”
For now, Iwona is looking forward to rest and relaxation during her retirement. She said she’ll still have to work part time to make a living but feels excited for her next chapter.
“We thank you City of Columbia,” she said. “We thank The District. We thank you our landlord. We thank you, all of you, for your support and being loyal to us, and being very helpful.”
