Milk bars are very cheap restaurants where you can eat generic Polish food like “in home”. It’s a popular thing in Poland, you can find many of them in one city. The typical things that you can eat there are schnitzel or de volaille with mashed potatoes, chicken soup, tomato soup, borscht, pierogies, goulash, żurek, gołąbki and others.
It usually costs between 20 and 30 zł, so let’s say that about €5.
What does it look like in your country?
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My stepdad from eastern germany told me stories about the “milk bars” back when he was young. I guess my own equivalent would be an Imbiss
Brasserie would be the closest, some are more pricy but usually they have generous portions that are not too expensive
We do! They’re called [Esnaf lokantası ](https://tr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esnaf_lokantas%C4%B1) (tradesman’s restaurant) as they’re usually frequented by working people during lunchtime. As you can see on the photo, you can choose from the precooked dishes. Water comes in jugs, and there are basins full of sliced bread (although nowadays there’s more bottled water and prepacked bread for hygiene reasons). They’re usually very good, since they rely on regular customers unlike the ones in more touristic places.
Probably a ‘greasy spoon’ style of [traditional cafe](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/38/Fortess_Cafe_Restaurant%2C_Tufnell_Park%2C_NW5.jpg).
[A good article about them here](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-30879406)
The sort of place builders and tradespeople would go for a Full English Breakfast, for example.
There was a fad for places called milk bars in the 60s in the UK, from what my parents have said they were just ‘posher’ cafes that served ‘new’ things like burgers, milkshakes and frothy coffee.
we used to have milk bars which were real milk bars, oriented around milk products, desserts, milk shakes etc. These disappear with socialism. The what you have in poland is called Jidelna (eatery) where you get your food on a tray and not all (if any) places will be to seating. It is also sometimes a part of old school butchery (these are usually my favourites)
Upon reading the title I immediately thought of the milk bar in Majora’s Mask.
To actually answer your question, there are similar establishments over here. We call them *tascas*, and they’re basically places where you can grab a meal and/or drink for cheap. They’re not fancy, but a lot of them have a cozy vibe.
Maybe the closest thing here in Germany are the Fleischerei. Although they tend to sell a lot of cold meats to go as well.
I’ve been to Poland and actually enjoyed the Milkbar experience but we don’t have anything exactly like that.
In Spain the equivalent would be a bar in the industrial district (bar de poligono industrial). You could get a three course meal at lunchtime for 10 euros and a glass of house with with it too. I love those places. Eventhough I don’t work in the poligonos industriales anymore, sometimes I still go to some, as I love the atmosphere. And the food is homey and very tasty. Last holidays I even took my girlfriend to a lunch there, as I consider a visit in one of those as an incontournable part of visiting Spain and getting to know it’s culture!
There are a few different set ups in France like this. The *relais routiers* are truck stop restaurants that offer decent food at reasonable prices. In Paris the “Bouillon” restaurants are probably the closest thing. The food is good and inexpensive, and you often see big queues to get in. In your standard French town or village there’s usually a brasserie that pitches itself as less expensive.
I visit the milk bar with my droogs to sharpen up before a bit of the old ultraviolence.
There’s nothing that is directly analogous in Britain (Milk Bars in Poland are great, contributed to my alarming weight gain when I spent 6 months there) but a couple of similar-ish things exist
– ‘Greasy spoon’ or transport cafes. Mostly cater to builders and lorry drivers, these fulfill the basic ‘hot and filling food at low cost’ requirement. You don’t generally get these in city centres, but more likely in suburbs, industrial estates, and on regional roads with heavy lorry traffic.
* Self-service fish and chip ‘restaurants’ in seaside resorts. In a lot of traditional seaside resort towns you get self-service places that mostly do chips with peas and your choice of fish/pie/sausage/etc. You collect the food from a counter (paying in advance), and would often clear up after yourself as well.
* Wetherspoons. If I’m out and fancy a large cheap meal, there’s a Spoons in every town centre that will fulfill the need. It’s technically a chain of pubs so not as close as the first two, but worth mentioning.
Unfortunately we used to have Osterie bit they are disappearing. They are mainly wine bars (not the fancy ones) which also had some homemade food. I love polish food by the way!
There doesn’t really exist cheap places to eat a proper meal in Denmark, tbh. As a result it’s comparatively rare to dine out, the thought of for example going to a restaurant during lunch with your coworkers as an everyday thing is insane here.
We have “sausage wagons” that sell Danish hotdogs and “grill bars” that sell hot dogs, burgers, Danish burgers, pork sandwiches, fries etc which is about the cheapest you can go. But it’s not the same as what you describe and it’s not like what you’d eat at home.
Counter question: Is it true that it’s called “milk bar” in Poland, because in the past they served mostly vegetarian meatless dishes there? (As meat was more expensive back then)
[This](https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/ShowUserReviews-g4282079-d2330908-r280474169-The_Horn-Errol_Perth_and_Kinross_Scotland.html) is the only one I know. It’s been there forever. Basically a kind of café of the traditional UK variety – more of a fried food place (bacon rolls, egg and chips, etc) than a café in the patisserie sense (cakes and scones).
This kind of cuisine is offered by stolovaja/canteen type of establishments here, the ones where you take your tray to the table yourself.
They have a name: lactobar.
There used to be lactobars in communist Romania. Some company tried to revive this, but not clue how they are doing. The assortment was focused on dairy products however, not chicken soup, etc .
Most restaurants in Spain offer a lunch special priced between 8-12€ consisting of starter, main and sometimes also a soup or small appetizer, dessert, a drink and sometimes coffee. Where I am from it’s almost always 3 dishes + dessert and for the starter (usually a hearthy stew) they bring you the whole pot and you serve yourself as much as you want. So per instance you could have some scorpion fish paté on toast, then a dish of fabada (white bean stew with different meats), then steak on blue cheese sauce, and rice pudding for dessert, all of it with a bottle of cider to help the food go down. I have used all typical products that are commonly found on menú del día for this example.
I only knew the term milk bar from polish band Myslovitz’s album Korova milky bar which again refers to the movie Clockwork Orange as far as I know. Didn’t know it was quite a thing in Poland. Maybe it’s a bit like “Kneipe” in Germany but they are more about drinking beer and having cheap local food stuff.
Well, yes, kind of. But they don’t have a special name.
First options are restaurants at pit stops for truckers that get cheap and big portions of simple meals such as stews or beans and pasta.
Second are locales in cities offering lunches for workers on their lunch breaks. They usually have 3 or 4 meals each day and you can pick from that.
I wish. But nobody wants to prepare [stamppot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamppot?wprov=sfti1) and sell it I guess.
We have “столовые” (“stolovye” – canteen), where you can get a full course meal (salad, soup, main dish and drink) for ≈200-300₽ (≈$3-4). The quality range is huge, though, and may vary from the shittiest Soviet eateries with heavily processed food that looks and tastes like watery barf to actually really good places with tasty and affordable meals and very nice atmosphere. Most stolovye also sell pastry and other desserts.
Almost all of them serve just typical Russian food:
* soups – borsht, shchi, solyanka, mushroom soup, vegetable soup, chicken soup, etc;
* main dishes – patties, stewed meat, sausages, fried fish, fried liver, etc;
* side dishes – buckwheat, rice, pasta, fried/stewed potatoes or vegetables;
* drinks – kompot, tea, or coffee;
* desserts – buns (with apples, berries, cabbage, egg and leak, meat, chicken, cottage cheese, normal cheese, etc.), pies (same fillings), simple cakes (e.g. Zebra), pancakes, syrniki, etc.
Menus may vary depending on the region and include local dishes, like ocpocmaq and peremech in Tatarstan and Bashkortostan.
We used to have *söökla* (*eatery*), this was basically a soviet “[Stolovoya](https://www.google.com/search?q=stolovaya&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjR8I-3yYX8AhVrwosKHb6SAu0Q_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1280&bih=559&dpr=1.5)”. Unfortunately, with the 90s hating everything even remotely connected to the soviets, we lost cheap eating places.
We kind of have this concept that our [cafés](https://pikkpoiss.ee/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/cropped-IMG_2597-scaled-1.jpg) and “[pubs](https://d2glqrouin7mid.cloudfront.net/photos/7/pahadpoisid.jpg)” usually have [lunch offers](https://nami-nami.ee/files/recipes/380/hakklihakaste.jpg) during the day (the simplest being potatoes/rice/buckwheat + meat/sauce with a bit of fresh salad), even if the cafe offers only minimal other “real food” (so mostly just buns and cakes and stuff like that). Therefore it is super rare to go to a restaurant for lunch and basically unheard of if they don’t have a lunch offer. Nobody wants to buy a 1-3 course meal from a restaurant daily.
I live in The Netherlands where there are many Polish folks in the neighbourhood. They have restaurant exactly how you described it. Menu changes everyday, and one meal cost around 9 euro. They also serve Pierogi every Tuesday. Very cheap for NL standard. All the foods there taste amazing.
The noise and look on the plates reminds a bit of the self-service restaurants that larger supermarkets have. These are popular with seniors and workers. They’re cheaper than a normal restaurant.
Pretty much the same, it is called “family diner” though. Those are everywhere.
Not as its own genre. It would be called cheap traditional restaurant (Gasthaus) here.
Yes
They are usually called *lunchrestaurang* (“lunch restaurant”) or *dagens-restaurang* (“plat de jour-restaurant”), or similar. A dated term is *mjölkbar* (“milk bar”).
You often find them in industrial areas and bussiness parks, or hospitals and universities. Despite commonly renting the kitchen and canteen inside a large factory or bussiness, external customer are almost always also welcome.
The cost is about 90 kronor (≈9€) to 110 kronor (≈11€)
And just FYI; the city centre restaurants do also offer plat du jour, often to a similar price.
Yes I would say whetherspoons and certainly not for the 7am pints.
After what I’ve heard and understood it’s been a thing in Norway previously. I’m not sure about how spread out they were or what they served, but it was probably a common thing in small towns. Today they don’t exist anymore as far as I know. Traditional Norwegian food particularly from the south eastern countryside (so called *husmannskost*) has had an upswing the last decade and is served in semi-fancy restaurants in Oslo now at a premium price, besides the “brown” establishments which have always been there.
No, not as a concept. We have snackbars where you can eat junk food which is cheap. Sometimes you find places like community centers who offer something like this. Eat a daghap/meal of the day where you can eat a cheap meal.
We don’t call them milk bars cause milk bars for us usually means a milkshake bar. But we do have traditional food cafes, some are like chain restaurants which are on the pricier side, but there are also dirt cheap eateries where you can expect home-made like quality. [Here’s an article about one in Kaunas (GoogleTranslate version).](https://www-delfi-lt.translate.goog/verslas/mano-eurai/a-uzkalnis-kaune-rado-pigiausius-gyvenimo-pietus-ir-liko-gyvas.d?id=68227800&_x_tr_sl=lt&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=lt&_x_tr_pto=wapp)
We had a large number of [milk bars in East Germany](https://www.ddr-postkarten-museum.de/index.php?/tags/96-milchbar). Those used to be focused on milk based drinks, ice cream, and the like. The atmosphere was slighly upscale, better than the cheaper pubs, which had significantly more smoking and drinking.
A few of these are still around, in most places today’s replacement would be an ice cream parlour.
Not familiar with the term, but most lunch restaurants in Finland are simply *lounasravintola*, lunch resturant, and serve Finnish home-cooked style cuisine aka Hausmannskost. You find these all over the place. You grab a tray and cutlery, and grab salad and bread from a buffet, then pick a lunch option from a selection, your milk of choice and then pay.
We have places that only serve Swedish husmanskost and maybe some fish and chips, usually Swedish bars. They’re however rather pricey and 15€ is probably the cheapest you will find. I can’t think of any restaurant where food is cheap in sweden
Not really. Eating out became extremely expensive in the last decades and we’re really lacking on that regard. People with lower incomes have to manage somehow or spend extra time at home cooking the day before and bringing some food with them.
The closest thing would be a falafel stand, but it’s hardly a full meal and not a seat-down place usually