The story
Welcome to the beating heart of Kazimierz. As you stand here in the center of Plac Nowy, your eyes are immediately drawn to the singular, circular building rising like a stone fortress in the middle of the square. This is the Okrąglak, or the Rotunda, and it holds within its walls the entire history of this district—a story that transitions from the somber traditions of a ritual slaughterhouse to its modern-day status as a world-famous temple of street food.
Take a moment to look at the architecture. Built in 1900, this brick rotunda was designed specifically as a kosher poultry slaughterhouse. In the early 20th century, Kazimierz was the center of Jewish life in Kraków, and the Okrąglak was a hive of activity.
Here, the shochet—the ritual slaughterer—performed his duties according to strict religious laws, ensuring that the community had access to kosher meat. For decades, the air here would have been thick with the sounds of a bustling market and the specific rituals of a community that had called these streets home for centuries. After the devastation of World War Two, the Jewish population of Kazimierz was nearly gone, and the building’s original purpose vanished with them.
For years, the Okrąglak served as a general grocery hall and a storage space, its grand windows boarded up or used for mundane trade. But as the 1990s arrived and Kazimierz began its slow, bohemian transformation, the Rotunda found a new life. Today, if you follow the scent of toasted bread and melting cheese, you’ll find yourself at one of the many small windows that encircle the building.
This is now the undisputed capital of the zapiekanka. This open-faced toasted baguette, traditionally topped with sautéed mushrooms and cheese, is Poland’s most iconic street food. While you can find them across the country, eating a zapiekanka at the Okrąglak is a rite of passage.
Whether it’s high noon on a Tuesday or three in the morning on a Saturday when the surrounding bars like Alchemia and Singer are overflowing with crowds, the Okrąglak remains open, its windows glowing with neon lights. Look around the square itself. On Saturday mornings, it transforms into an antique lover’s paradise, filled with silver trinkets and black-and-white photographs.
On Sundays, it’s a clothing market. But the Okrąglak remains the anchor. It is a symbol of resilience—a building that served the spiritual and dietary needs of a lost world, only to reinvent itself as the culinary soul of modern Kraków.
Grab a napkin, join the queue, and take a bite of history. You are standing in a place where the sacred and the profane, the old world and the new, meet over a slice of toasted bread.