Ryszard Zawadzki, who runs a pair of northwest-side restaurants, got his start in the kitchen of the LA Playboy mansion two years after he arrived from Poland. “In 1971 I was in E.C. Goodman Tech Chef School in New Britain, Connecticut, and there was an announcement that the Playboy mansion was looking for a European chef,” remembers Zawadzki, who was only 22 at the time. “I went to the mansion, and they put me to work. The second day [Hugh] Hefner came to the kitchen. He knew I was from Poland, and he said he was looking for someone from Europe to run the kitchen. On Sunday they had a big function, and the next day they hired me.”

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On weekends when Hefner was in residence, the mansion’s eight-man kitchen ran 24 hours a day. Besides banquets, they often prepared lunch for 200 on Friday afternoons and barbecues during the Sunday tennis outings. They also satisfied the gustatory whims of celebrity guests such as Bill Cosby, Dean Martin, and Frank Sinatra. When Roman Polanski moved into the mansion to edit Macbeth, Zawadzki provided him with home cooking. “The butler came to me, and he said, ‘Ryszard, we’ve got a Polish guy, and he wants kielbasa.’ In California they don’t know kielbasa. I called him and spoke to him in Polish. He’s so surprised he dropped the phone. He said, ‘I’m sorry. I thought I was having a dream.’”

When Hefner wasn’t around, the only person living at the mansion was his girlfriend, Barbi Benton. “She was a great cook,” Zawadzki says. “Many times we baked together–cookies, dessert. We planned the menu.”

Zawadzki had begun building his name in the Polish community before he opened the Pierogi Inn, as host of the Channel 25 TV program Cooking With Chef Ryszard. Usually he cooked with Polish-American luminaries, such as Cook County commissioner Ted Lechowicz and Cook County circuit court clerk Aurelia Pucinski, but he was willing to share his kitchen with celebrities from other ethnic groups too. “Congressman Gutierrez came in–he cooked some kind of fish. The guy from Nick’s Fishmarket–we cooked together.”

Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo by Eugene Zakusilo.