Daquise rises from the ashes

There is something irresistibly romantic about Daquise, the Polish restaurant in South Kensington that has just reopened after being gutted by fire last September.

Its elderly patrons may not be much to look at, with their borscht-stained teeth and moth-eaten cardigans, but nearly all of them played a part in the anti-Communist struggle that eventually liberated Poland - and the rest of Eastern Europe - from Soviet tyranny in 1989. Indeed, at one point Daquise was the unofficial headquarters of Edward Raczynski, the Polish president-in-exile from 1979 to 1986.

'The old generation are not very mobile any more, but they're still coming,' says Jola Pinchard, the manageress for 13 years. 'They come for the food - and because it's not very expensive.' It certainly isn't. I had a very decent set lunch for £7.50.

It even included a glass of wine, though I'd advise anyone thinking of visiting Daquise not to enquire about the vintage. I made the mistake of asking my waitress whether there was any choice about the wine that came with the meal. 'Yes,' she replied, giving me a withering look. 'You can choose between red or white.'

Daquise first threw open its doors in 1947 and, by the looks of it, very little has changed in the intervening years. Tables covered in plastic tablecloths still sit on a linoleum floor and the walls are still decorated with Polish bricabrac.

When the whole place went up in flames four months ago, the owners used the insurance money to create an exact replica of the original restaurant. 'Our customers don't like change,' explains the manageress. 'At one point we decided it would be nice to play a bit of classical music in the background, but one of our regulars got up a petition to complain about it and that was the end of that.'

Perhaps they should have played the theme from The Ipcress File instead. Daquise's main claim to fame, apart from being London's first Polish restaurant, is that it was where Christine Keeler regularly met with Yevgeny Ivanov, the senior naval attaché at the Russian embassy. If she ever passed on any military secrets gleaned from her pillow talk with John Profumo, this is where she would have done it.

Rather surprisingly, on the afternoon I was there the other diners weren't exclusively octogenarians. Since Poland joined the EU in 2004, Daquise has become a home from home for a new generation of Polish expats, most of them eager to sample the authentic cuisine. The menu at Daquise boasts such classics as salted fillet herring, stuffed cabbage and potato pancakes - all of them very reasonably priced.

My meal consisted of a large bowl of chicken noodle soup, followed by Brittany beans and kielbasa in a spicy tomato sauce accompanied by two scoops of mashed potato. It wasn't an epicurean feast, but it wasn't half bad, either. If I'd been a migrant worker toiling on a building site, this would have been just the thing to fortify me against the cold of a winter's day.

Daquise is situated at the rear of South Kensington Tube. At one point, it looked as though it might fall victim to redevelopment. A £110 million scheme designed by architect Terry Farrell was submitted to the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea for planning permission in 2003.