When, after three years of living in Eastern Europe, I came back to the UK, I found myself acutely nostalgic for the post-communist world. Life over there had a charm and directness that London seemed to lack. Luckily, I discovered that even in the capital you can find the best of Eastern Europe all around you – if you know where to look.

A lovely place to walk into on a winter afternoon, or to visit at Orthodox Easter, as people teem outside and priests scatter holy water about

I was aware of course, even in my teens, of Polish London. There was the restaurant Daquise in South Kensington which, before its 2012 refit, was one of those places you couldn’t imagine the area without. It had a cosy, comforting quality to it, retro but completely uncontrived: lino floors, formica tables and some strange Christmassy artworks that were up all year round, giving it a festive feel. Daquise was the perfect place to stop off after visiting the Natural History Museum or the V&A – the conversations you had in there were oddly heightened, and over its glass cups of milky coffee you saw, as one novelist pointed out, couples visibly falling in love.

A few minutes away on Exhibition Road, you had the Polish Hearth Club (Ognisko Polskie), opened at the start of second world war. Ognisko had a sumptuous sprucing up a decade ago (no one was complaining, especially the diners). But it was equally likeable, if in a different way, in its........

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