Best wine bars in Prague

Best wine bars in Prague

Sure, Prague nightlife may be mostly associated with Czech beer (and lots of Czech beer), but Czech wine, after a long but troubled past especially during the Communist rule, has been making a big comeback recently. Never heard of Czech wine? No wonder. With a production capped by the EU at about 1% of the French production of wine, there are hardly any exports of Czech and Moravian wine abroad. Yes, we like to keep it all to ourselves. Sorry.

And that’s exactly whyvisiting a wine bar is one of the best things to do in Prague. Prague wine bars tend to be intimate, small bars that serve good wines from the Bohemian and Moravian wine regions and from abroad. They also sell somewine gifts, like organic grape seed oils, grape jelly and other produce made by Czech and Moravian winemakers, which would make for a great, conveniently small souvenir. And you will be surprised how good Czech and Moravian wines can be. Many of our guests surely are, and that's why we make a point of tasting Czech wines in the course of our Prague food tour. (And of course, we taste Moravian wines during our Moravian wine tours, too.)

These are the best wine bars in Prague in our opinion. You probably weren’t planning to create your own wine tour in Prague, but a visit to any of these wine bars in Prague may change your mind and plans for good. Hey, you were warned, okay?


Looking for new Tasters of Prague!

Looking for new Tasters of Prague!

This is a big one, but we'll keep it short.

Want to join us? Help us do what we do? Yes, we’re looking for new Tasters of Prague! Qualifications? You should be a nice, friendly person. And if you genuinely like to meet new people, that’s a bonus. You should like food. A lot. Oh, and English and Czech are a must. In exchange, we offer lots of fun. Job satisfaction. Okay, we’ll throw in candy, too. Oh yeah, and money, of course. Sounds good? Please fill in our short form! We’ll get back to you soon. And please share if you know someone who’d be great at this. Thank you! We can't wait to meet you. Really.


Best breakfast in Prague

Best breakfast in Prague

If you’ve read this blog before, you know we love breakfast and wrote about breakfast in Prague before. We can’t honestly think of a better way to start the day than just relax, let it all hang out, have an opulent breakfast and prepare for what the day has to offer. 

And because we like breakfast so much, we do fully realize that the "state of breakfast in Prague” is still not ideal. Just look at the thumbnails of the pictures we’ve taken: eggs, eggs and more eggs. Creative dishes for breakfast in Prague are rare and far apart. But things have been changing, as more people have become used to eating breakfast out over the weekends. Two years ago, getting breakfast on a Sunday did not require much thought. Today, you are out of luck if you don’t reserve tables ahead in many popular places. (So please do.) We believe and hope that the pictures for the next update of this post will offer more variety. Fingers crossed.

These are our favorite breakfast spots in Prague. (Special thanks go to our friends Honza and Pavla who shared many Sunday breakfasts with us, coming in super hungry and then waiting patiently as we take the perfect picture of each spread.)


Our Tokyo trip

Our Tokyo trip

When we were planning the trip to Tokyo, we were approaching our stay with respect and a bit of caution. We were intimidated by the different culture, the impenetrable language and rigid customs. Having spent nearly a week in Tokyo, we must say the respect has grown, while the caution disappeared. We absolutely loved our stay in Tokyo. Staying in Tokyo gets you the thrill and excitement of seeing something new and different, and none of the intimidation of seeing something new and different.  

When we were planning our three-week Asian trip, we've reserved one week for Tokyo. What a mistake. We really would love to spend more time in Tokyo, and venture out into other Japanese cities, too. Oh well. Don’t repeat our mistake. If you’re planning a trip to Tokyo, reserve the time the city deserves. We’ve already promised ourselves we would be back. 


Best dishes in Prague in 2015

Best dishes in Prague in 2015

Oh, you’ve got to love annual recaps. They are a fun way of retelling the year, sieving out the events that proved to be, in hindsight, redundant, and leaving the things that will remain relevant for years to come. What were the best restaurants in Prague that opened last year? We’ve already tried to capture the best in our 2015 Prague food scene recap.

But now it’s time to get more personal. What were the dishes we liked the most in Prague in 2015? We do have a list of our must-eats in Prague but we're always on the lookout for something new. So we've created a rundown of the best dishes that were introduced in 2015 or that we tried that year for the very first time. Regardless, it’s a very personal and biased metric, but in a sense the most true one. Food is not something you can break to bits and analyze. It’s about tastes and flavors and emotions. It’s about satisfaction. And these dishes satisfied us the most in 2015, and we hope we can keep having them in 2016 too. Here’s a rundown of our favorite dishes in Prague in 2015.


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The Prague food scene in the year 2015: the Recap

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The Prague food scene in the year 2015: the Recap

You don't realize how good of a year you’ve had until you start counting the venues that have opened and realize that only a few have closed. And that’s what we’ve come to realize when we were writing this summary post, following a tradition we started last year with our 2014 recap.

2015 was indeed a good year. Not a revolutionary year perhaps, but still a year that saw a few openings that did or may still shake up the particular industries. And who knows? In hindsight it may actually prove to have been the year when things changed forever. Here’s a recap of what happened on the Prague food scene in 2015. Just to make sure we get each other: we only write about venues we feel are worth writing about, so if we’ve missed something, it may have been on purpose. Or we just may have missed something. (Let us know if we did.) This is not an exhaustive list and it is not meant to be one.


Prague Restaurant Preview: Eska

Prague Restaurant Preview: Eska

Not many restaurants opened in Prague this year have stirred so much emotion and caused so many heated discussions as Eska, the latest restaurant by Prague’s ubiquitous Ambiente group of restaurants that already owns and operates such heavyweights as the Lokal pubs, Cafe Savoy, Cestr or La Degustation. Eska is Ambiente’s attempt to redefine what modern casual Czech cuisine is, so of course it got people talking.

Ambiente will always find it a bit more difficult to warm the foodie circles up to their new openings because they are not exactly the mom-and-pop underdog people tend to root for on a subconscious level. They are not, by definition, the hidden gem you will keep for yourself from your friends and the wide public. No, they are the big money, the 700-employee behemoth that, in a way, defines the Prague food scene, so of course they will have as many haters as they have fans, if not more. But regardless of that, they are one of the biggest trendsetters in Prague when it comes to food, so when Ambi talks, or opens a restaurant with an entirely new concept for Prague, you listen.

Also, the stakes were heightened by the fact that the restaurant, which opened early November, was a long time coming, with the first planned opening date in May or June, and the information was leaking fast. We were supposed to see very modern design of an eatery that combines a restaurant, a bakery and a coffee shop. While the restaurant was not going to be purely vegetarian, it would be inspired by Nordic cuisine with all the associated fermentation and pickling, and focus on seasonal vegetables. And it should have been unlike anything in Prague yet. So how is it, really? Should you care? Or visit? Here’s our thoughts.


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Prague Christmas Dining Guide: Eating Out on Christmas and NYE

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Prague Christmas Dining Guide: Eating Out on Christmas and NYE

If we got a penny for every email we get in November and December asking “Where should we eat on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve?”… we’d have lots of pennies. Yes. Dining out in Prague is hard over Christmas, especially if you don’t like hotel restaurants. (And yes, we don’t particularly like them either.)

It’s funny: while the Czechs may form statistically one of the most atheist societies in the world, they do like and celebrate Christmas. Heck, kids write letters to Baby Jesus, because he brings Christmas presents! (Sorry, no imagery behind that.) And Czech Christmas could also be easily called the National Day of Overeating at Home, which means that nearly all eateries will shut down to some extent, especially for Christmas Eve. So if you are hungry on Christmas Eve, you will probably stay hungry until Christmas Day. Mark our words.

Of course, you don’t have to be a foreign visitor to have a keen interest in Christmas dining options. We mean, have you ever hosted a Christmas Eve dinner for the family? Exactly. Everybody’s late, you’re stressed (honey, have you bought the sweet wine your mom likes?), the potato salad tastes funny and the carp has bones. And then bitter disappointments and fake smiles under the Christmas tree. Yeah. Thank you but no, thank you. Why not just skip it all and have a great dinner somewhere nice, like the solid and self-respecting humans we all are?

So we have rung a few numbers, talked to a few friends, browsed a few websites, and set up this Prague Christmas Dining Guide. Sure, you may now think you will not need it at all. But trust us: you’ll wish you’d paid attention to it when the morning of December 24 arrives. Bookmark this post. Act on it now. Or weep later. Merry Christmas!


Meet a Prague local: Tomas Karpisek of Ambiente

Meet a Prague local: Tomas Karpisek of Ambiente

When we talk about Tomas Karpisek, the founder of the ubiquitous Ambiente group of restaurants, on our Prague food tours, we often describe him as the “Steve Jobs of the Prague culinary scene”. Sure, it's overstatement, but it’s not that far off. If there is anyone who sets food trends in the Czech Republic, it’s Tomas. The appearance isn’t that far off, either: we’re yet to see Tomas in something that even barely resembles a business suit. He’s more of a jeans-and-a-t-shirt guy. Also, just like the late Jobs, he’s a visionary of sorts and has a bigger plan, too. And he’s undoubtedly one of the most respected personalities on the food scene, as witnessed by our interview with Hana Michopulu, the owner of the popular Sisters bistro.

What does not stick in the Jobs analogy is the demeanor. Despite his achievements, Tomas is one of the humblest and most approachable people we know. He also clearly thinks a lot about his job, and it is hard to catch him off-guard with anything food-related. But interviewing him is fascinating: he’s very open and his twenty-plus years in the business mean he has stories to tell. 

Interviewing Tomas now is more interesting than ever: the Ambiente group is now on the cusp of a generational shift marked by the openings of the Eska restaurant (this interview was held two weeks before it opened last week) and the Bokovka wine bar, both co-created and run by a young generation of chefs and managers, a trend started by the Nase Maso butcher shop over a year ago. 

We met over coffee to discuss a few things. We planned for an hour. We ended up rushing the last questions after nearly two. We talked about the past, the present, and the future of Ambiente and Tomas, too. This is what he told us. 


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