Eating Prague, Part 1: Traditional Czech Cuisine (and the Cookbook Giveaway Winner!)

Hanging out in a tower in the Old City Hall in Prague's Old Town Square ... and thinking about all the good food down there. The smells of smoky cooked pork were actually wafting up from below. For real.

While Prague is undoubtedly a top tier sightseeing, cultural, and historical destination for many travelers,  it is not generally mentioned along with the other great culinary meccas of Europe. I think that's a shame. Many people assume that traditional Czech cuisine is an unvarying parade of hearty and heavy variations on the same theme of big piles of meat.  But the traditional Czech cuisine I had in Prague was anything but monotonous, as its unfounded reputation would seem to imply.  Is the food hearty? Sure. Meaty? Often! Heavy? Sometimes. But unvarying or boring? Not at all, as you'll see here. (Of course, Poppa and I didn't only eat traditional Czech food. We had some very surprising meals, as you'll see in future posts.)

Our first meal in Prague was at Lokal, a very popular, bustling neighborhood eatery:

While it does seem that a lot of old-style Czech food is packaged for tourists, this place was packed with an all-local crowd. In fact, there is only one English menu in the whole place - though we did our best with the Czech menu, our jet lagged brains just couldn't make sense of it. We did much better later in the week when we returned here.

After a nine hour plane trip to Vienna followed by a five-hour train ride to Prague, we were craving a nice big drink. Since Prague is known as the beer capital of the world, naturally we went with the justifiably famous Pilsner Urquell:

Aaaahhh, that's better.

Even though Lokal is a newish place, they do one very old school thing: As soon as your beer is empty, the guy in the apron in the photo below places another one in front of you - it's like magic:

You have to be really firm if you don't want another, and I thought he kind of looked hurt when I said "No, thank you." So if you know you're through, try to nurse your last beer. We started with what would go down as one of my (many!) favorite things from the trip, Prague ham with horseradish cream:

We even came back for this on the last day. There was something so simple and yet so satisfying about the combination of the slightly salty ham with the pungent horseradish. Perfect beer food.  With this, we had something called "Davle's spicy sausages with fresh horseradish and mustard:"

Nope, I do not know who this "Davle" is, but I commend him on his fine sausages!

Ah, but that was just for starters! For our mains, we had beef goulash with bread knedlicky, which are translated as "dumplings" but really are more like thick squshy pieces of bread, perfect for soaking up sauce (truth be told, I prefer potato knedlicky):

And on the advice of our server, we got a Czech classic, roast beef with a creamy sauce and cranberries:

Many restaurants in Prague have not quite got the hang of the whole appetizer-comes-out-before-the main-course thing, and so in short order we ended up with a righteous pile of food on our table. It was so much in fact, that we got incredulous, yet admiring, knods from a table of Czechs to our left. As a point of pride, we ate everything - with pleasure.

When we returned later in the week, I got a fish dish - carp fillet in cumin butter - and Poppa got the almost (but not quite!) redundantly porky pork schnitzel fried in lard:

The next day we walked to the Klášterní Pivovar Strahov, the brewery at the Strahov Monastery ...

 ... and ate at the restaurant there ...

And had some more beer. We tried their special amber, and the seasonal Shrovetide beer:

It was admittedly mostly tourists eating here, but the food was authentic and not gimmicky, and as I said, they make their own beer, so that's worth a trip alone. I don't mind eating with tourists now and then - my big no-no is eating anyplace that has its own gift shop.

We had a plate of meats ...

... and my favorite, a plate of gloriously stinky cheeses - garlic, smoked fish, beer cheese, and something that tasted a bit like liptaeur:

 

Did I mention how great this food is with beer? Man. We actually came back here later in the week for a bite - we needed sustenance in order to climb the tower at St. Vitus Cathedral. This time, we had pickled cheese from Oloumouc, and a great onion soup with Roquefort toast:

Later in the week, we visited a very old-school place called Česká Kuchyně, essentially a cafeteria:

When you go in, a greeter hands you a ticket. This greeter is actually also the cashier who rings you up when you leave - the place gets really busy, and I suspect she has an extra arm tucked away somewhere, given that she seemed to be doing at least 3 things simultaneously.

You go through a line and point at what you want, and at each stage it's marked on your ticket. Going in, we had no idea what to do since nothing was in English. One of the servers behind the counter spoke English, which was almost disappointing, as we have a perverse love of things that are needlessly complicated. We ended up with a delicious pile of saucy meat and garlicky veg:

Meanwhile, Poppa Trix spotted a little kid eating dessert with his grandfather. Turns out it's the very same dessert Poppa used to enjoy as a little boy with his grandpa when he was visiting his grandparents in Vienna! It's basically dough with sugar and poppy seeds:

 Poppa flashed backed into some happy childhood memories in a big way:

We also had lovely soups at U Betlémské Kaple, a place suggested to us by the hostess at our excellent pension, The Green Garland. I had a pungent garlic soup (lower right) and Poppa had something called frankfurtska:

When we ordered it, we thought we were asking for sausages! But actually, it's a kind of spicy hot dog soup. Note that I have switched to Moravian wine at this point. Kind of really full of beer.

For our last meal in Prague, we headed to another local joint, Hospoda U Novaka. Poppa had another yummy stewy-meaty-knedlicky dish  ... 

 ... while I had a very unusual dish called the Templars Saute Mix, a thick, crunchy savory potato pancake filled with sauteed pork and liver.

We did eat at one more traditional place I haven't mentioned here, but it was such an odd (in a good way) experience that it gets a post all to itself. So stay tuned!

And now it's time to announce the winner of the Nick Malgieri cookbook giveaway. You thought I forgot, but I had to make you scroll through all my photos, now didn't I? To select the winner, I used the list randomizer on Random.org, and if you tweeted, I put your name down twice. And the winner of Bake! is ... 

Kate @ Diethood!  Congrats! I'll be in touch to get your address:

And if you've read to the end of this incredibly long post, you now deserve  to gaze on this this beautiful view of Prague: