Stary Kleparz, the one to go to if you only go to one
The quickest way to understand how a city eats is to stand in its market at eight in the morning, and in Krakow that means Stary Kleparz (STA-ry KLEH-pash). It sits on ul. Krowoderska, a five-minute walk north of the Barbican - straight up through the gap in the Planty and across the busy Basztowa ring road. Kleparz was a separate town before Krakow swallowed it, chartered back in the fourteenth century, and there has been trading on this ground in one form or another ever since. The covered halls you walk through today are much later, but the atmosphere is unbroken.
Under the roof you get the serious stuff: homemade twaróg (TFA-roog, a fresh curd cheese) sold by the slab, wheels of oscypek (osh-TSY-pek) smoked sheep's cheese from the Tatra mountains, ropes of kiełbasa, buckets of pickled cucumbers with dill still floating in the brine, and in autumn, trays of forest mushrooms that no supermarket in Britain would be allowed to sell you. Around the edges are the flower sellers, the bread stalls and a couple of stands doing hot food.
Hours run roughly from 7am to 6pm on weekdays and finish earlier on Saturday, often around 3 or 4pm, and the market is closed on Sunday - so check before you build a lazy weekend morning around it. Go before 10am if you want the good produce and the older vendors in a talkative mood. By early afternoon the best of it has gone and half the stalls are packing up.
Plac Nowy: a working square by day, zapiekanki by night
Plac Nowy (plats NO-vy) in Kazimierz is two completely different places depending on when you arrive. The round brick building in the middle - everyone calls it the Okrąglak (o-KRONG-lak), "the round one" - was built as a kosher poultry slaughterhouse and now houses a ring of hatches selling zapiekanka (zap-yeh-KAN-ka), the halved baguette loaded with mushrooms, cheese and whatever else you point at. Expect somewhere around 20-30 PLN depending on toppings. Endzior is the hatch people queue at, though the difference between them is smaller than the internet suggests, and at 2am nobody is doing comparative tasting.
By day the same square is a genuine neighbourhood market: vegetables, eggs, cut flowers, cheap socks. At weekends the surrounding stalls turn over to secondhand clothing, old books, chipped enamelware and a fair amount of communist-era tat aimed at visitors. Sunday morning has the best browsing. Prices move a little if you haggle, but not dramatically - offer a bit less, smile, accept the answer.
A word of warning about the square. The bars ringing it are pleasant on a summer evening and loud after midnight, and the market side of Plac Nowy is at its best on a weekday morning when it is simply people buying potatoes.
Hala Targowa, the Sunday antiques crowd and the sausage van
Hala Targowa on ul. Grzegórzecka, east of the Old Town towards the river, is not the upmarket food hall the name suggests. It is a plain interwar building with a car park attached, and its reputation rests on two things. Sunday morning is the antiques and bric-a-brac market, which starts early - sellers are laying out by 7am - and pulls collectors in from across the region. Old cameras, medals, vinyl, watch parts, postcards, genuinely strange furniture. Come at eight, bring cash, expect nothing to be labelled.
The second thing is the sausage van. On most evenings a blue van parks by the hall and grills kiełbasa over charcoal, served on a paper plate with a bread roll and a squirt of mustard for very little money. It runs late, well past midnight, and does not operate on Sundays, though the hours shift and it is worth asking a local before making a special trip. It is one of the few places in Krakow where tourists and taxi drivers queue side by side.
If you would rather shop somewhere calmer, Nowy Kleparz at the top end of ul. Długa is Stary Kleparz's less famous sibling: smaller, almost entirely local, better for everyday produce and considerably cheaper. Trams running north along Długa stop right beside it. Plac Targowy Imbramowski, further out in Prądnik, is the same idea with even fewer visitors.
What is actually in season, and when
Poland has real seasons and its markets still follow them, which is half the pleasure of shopping here. June is strawberries - truskawki (troos-KAV-kee) - sold in small woven punnets, and you smell the stall before you see it. July brings jagody, the little dark forest bilberries that end up inside pierogi and on top of pancakes, plus sour cherries by the bucket. August is tomatoes, plums and the start of the apple avalanche.
September and October are mushroom season, and this is the one worth timing a trip around. Vendors turn up with baskets of prawdziwki (porcini), kurki (chanterelles, bright yellow, very good fried in butter) and half a dozen species with no useful English name. They are picked in the forests around the city, and market selling is regulated, so what is on the table has generally been looked at by someone who knows. Autumn also brings pumpkins, quince and the beginning of the pickling frenzy.
Winter markets are shorter, colder and dominated by root vegetables, sauerkraut sold loose from barrels, dried mushrooms and smoked fish - especially in the run-up to Christmas Eve. December at Stary Kleparz is genuinely lovely, and the carp tanks in the days before Wigilia are a sight, if not always a comfortable one.
Cash, weights and the four Polish words you need
Card readers have spread but plenty of stallholders remain cash-only, so bring notes in smaller denominations. Nobody wants to break a 200 PLN note for a bag of apples. Use a bank ATM rather than the standalone machines on the tourist streets, and if a machine offers to charge you in pounds or euros, decline and pay in złoty.
Prices are per kilo unless the item is obviously sold by the piece, and you should ask rather than helping yourself from the display. Point, say poproszę (po-PRO-sheh, "I'd like"), indicate roughly how much with your hands, then dziękuję (jen-KOO-yeh, "thank you"). If you want half a kilo, "pół kilo" (poow KEE-lo) does the job. Bring a tote bag - the ones on offer cost extra and are thin.
Rough price sense, and these figures drift: a wheel of oscypek somewhere in the region of 15 PLN, seasonal berries around 15-25 PLN a punnet early in their season and much less at the peak, and a good length of smoked kiełbasa for well under what the same thing costs as a restaurant starter. A picnic assembled at Stary Kleparz and eaten on the Vistula bank costs less than one main course inside the Old Town.
Buying food to take home
Krakowski Kredens on the Main Square and elsewhere in town does the gift version of all this - preserves, honeys, fruit liqueurs and chocolate in packaging that survives a suitcase. It costs a good deal more than the market, and the packaging is what you are paying for.
If you want the real thing instead, the practical items are dried mushrooms, which weigh nothing and taste of the forest all winter; smoked cheese, which travels fine; honey; and bottled nalewka, which has to go in the hold. Fresh curd cheese and cold cuts are a bad idea unless you are driving home. Vacuum-packed kiełbasa is fine within the EU and a customs problem for UK and US travellers, so leave it behind.
One last thing. If a stallholder cuts a sliver of cheese or sausage and hands it across, that is not a sales tactic to be resisted - take it, eat it, and buy something small even if it was not what you came for. That exchange is the whole point of shopping this way, and you will remember it longer than the Cloth Hall.
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