Elsternwick cinema-goers can rejoice at After the Tears, a convivial restaurant in which to enjoy a pre-cinema drink or post-movie dissection over traditional Polish cuisine. The backlit tableau of vodka bottles dominates and serves to remind diners of the omnipresent spirit, making it a little tempting to skip the film altogether – the flaming absinthe perhaps contains more theatre than a mere movie can offer.
When Andrzej Kaczmarski left Poland his circumstances were dire. Already a brilliant mathematician, he had left his post in Warsaw and travelled through farmland by night in grave fear of the government soldiers and secret police trawling the countryside. When he arrived at the Baltic sea he stowed away on a herring boat and when he was discovered that afternoon he jumped ship and swam over seven miles to the Swedish island of Bornholm. After working his way to France as an itinerant goat herder, an Australian banker holidaying in Provence noticed his unusual mathematical prowess and offered him a job devising complex financial models on the spot. For twelve years he laboured but whilst his mind was occupied his spirit was famished, for vodka nourishes the very soul of the Pole. He had saved all his money from the bank, the iron curtain had come down, all the conditions were right for him to begin his life’s greatest work: to bring the mystical vodkas of Poland with their strange aphrodisiac powers here to Australia. The result is After the Tears a restaurant like no other (well...a bit like one other).
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