Zapiekanka z Plac Nowy

On a weekend night, with the bars of Kazimierz emptying onto the square, the windows around the okrąglak on Plac Nowy keep working until 02:00 or 03:00. A cook slides a split bagietka out of the oven and passes it over a steel sill in a thin paper sleeve, and the heat reaches both palms before anything else does, a flat, stinging warmth in the cold. The cheese has blistered brown along its edges. Steam rolls off the length of the bread and fogs in the lamplight. Then comes the question every window asks out loud: ketchup, sos czosnkowy, or both. The cook squeezes the bottle down the whole length in one pass, and the garlic reaches the queue before the bread does.

The build is short. A bagietka is split lengthwise and laid cut side up, sliced pieczarki are cooked before they go on, and grated yellow cheese is spread edge to edge so every bite carries both. Raw mushrooms would shed their water straight into the open crumb, which is why the cooking comes first. The oven takes it until the cheese blisters and the rim of crust turns hard. The first bite of the end crackles, the cheese stretches in strings between mouth and bread, and the mushroom underneath is hot, dense and faintly smoky. Sauce goes on after the bake, so the ketchup lands cool and sweet against the heat. At half a metre the bread works as a rafter: the crust stays stiff enough to carry the load, and the paper sleeve becomes a second handle.

The hatches ring a twelve-sided stone and brick rotunda, with an inner pavilion under a glazed lantern and an open corridor between the two. Zapiekanki come from a handful of separate windows in that ring, and Endzior, BarOko and Zapiekanki Królewskie each keep their own rack of sauces and a menu running to a dozen items or more. Ordering has two stages, a window and then a sauce. People eat standing on the pavement with the sleeve folded back, turning the bread as the heat leaves one end, which makes the square look like a long, slow picnic held in coats.

Past the plain mushroom-and-cheese base, the windows add ham, barbecue sauce, mozzarella, halloumi and pineapple. Each addition changes what the bread has to survive. Ham brings salt and a little fat, which the cheese absorbs without trouble. Pineapple and soft cheeses bring liquid, and liquid is what a split baguette handles worst: the middle softens to a pale damp strip while the ends stay glassy. The cooks build hundreds a night and know where that limit sits, so the heavily loaded versions come off the oven with less crunch than the plain one.

Timing at a busy hatch decides more than the recipe does. A baguette left on the rack under a lamp while an order is argued over loses its snap from the bottom up. Sauce poured in a flood instead of struck in a line soaks the crumb, the sleeve darkens and the last third folds. Eaten too fast, the cheese takes the skin off the roof of the mouth; eaten too slowly, the far end cools into a rubbery slab. The window that gets it right hands over bread that is still taut and still scalding at the first bite, with the cheese just beginning to set.

The okrąglak before the hatches

The zapiekanka is a People's Republic snack. In the 1970s a split baguette baked open under mushrooms and yellow cheese spread across Poland as cheap fast food, and the story told about it credits Edward Gierek, the party leader who worked in France and Belgium as a miner and came home partial to the long loaf. The okrąglak gave the snack a ready-made ring of serving hatches. Built in 1899 to 1900 as a covered market hall, the rotunda later housed a kosher poultry slaughterhouse and, after 1945, went back to ordinary market trade, its small shops serving for years as storerooms for traders.

That ring of windows is where the baguette settled in Kraków. The building entered the register of monuments on 19 December 2008, by which time the zapiekanka had long been its main trade, sold from separate hatches that each guard their own sauce list. No record names the first window on Plac Nowy to sell one.

Endzior is the window most often named, and its own start is dated to 1989, the year the market economy reached Polish street food and the rack of squeeze bottles began to grow. That is the earliest date attached to any hatch on the square, and a single repeated claim rather than a documented one, so it is worth holding loosely.