We run food tours in Prague. We’ve been running food tours in Prague for nearly 15 years now. And you often have questions about them. So this series aims to answer some of them. We are fans of full disclosure, and we think honesty is the best policy, so here we go, let’s break that fourth wall.
And the most common question on the tour is… (drum roll, please)…
How do you choose the restaurants that are a part of the food tour?
Rule of thumb: it has to be real.
Our choice of the stops on the tour may be guided by a few criteria, but it honestly isn’t rocket science: we go to wherever we like to eat ourselves. First and foremost, the stops on the food tour have to be a true reflection of our life experience as locals.
This also made setting up the tours easy back when we started in 2011 - when we approached the restaurants whether we could visit with the tours, they had already known us as regulars. We simply wanted to show our guests where we like to eat in Prague, and that spirit has remained true to this day.
Since the team of Taste of Prague has grown a bit over the years, the choice of new stops on the tour can the result of a more collaborative effort now: we all meet a few times a year, and discuss our options or new exciting prospects. We also do that over a text chain where we all give each other feedback and notify each other of changes in the restaurants we visit, or the public transport closures along the way. All of our guides like to eat out as much as we do, so they’ve all been to the new places already and are well informed. This can be a heated discussion at times, but we always come to a conclusion.
Rule of… ehh… second thumb: it has to be good.
We mean, duh. We run food tours in Prague, and we have to represent its food well. This goes without saying.
But since taste can be subjective, we pay a lot of attention to the restaurants’ sourcing, too. You get multiple tastings throughout the tour, so it’s clear that you will like some things better than others. But we need to make sure that even the thing you liked the least was sourced properly and is just honest, good eating. (Jan likes to say that he wouldn’t serve you anything he would not eat… sober.)
Rule three: it has to be meaningful.
What we eat on the food tour is very important. But why we eat it is equally as important for us. Pretty much all food tours are really cultural tours dressed as food tours, and ours is no different. So everything we serve should tell you something about how we live.
For instance, there is definitely going to be a pub on the tour, because the pub is not just a culinary, but also a cultural phenomenon - we can explain a lot about the Czechs in a pub. We like to have a mushroom dish on the tour, because Czechs are the world champions of mushroom foraging, which that will lead us to the high rate of summer house ownership in Czechia, which can lead us to the post-WWII expulsion of the German population of Czechia, which is something we talk about when we taste Becherovka, the national liquor, which is related to that issue, too. So what we eat can be a springboard to a narrative about the Czechs.
Other times, a restaurant can be a reflection of a local change, as districts in Prague get gentrified from post-industrial to residential, which is something our guests from just about anywhere can relate to also. We explain the restaurants and venues we visit to our guests, and we often do an even better job at it than the restaurants themselves, because the staff cannot spend so much time with their diners and explain every little detail.
So when we choose a new restaurant, we don’t just consider what are we going to eat there, but also what are we going to show, and what are we going to explain there about the realities of being Czech.
Rule four: it has to be run by nice people.
This is not just about the service, although service plays a big part of our decision process, too. When you walk in to a restaurant wit ha food tour, you have to feel welcome.
But we also care if the owners are ultimately nice people. At one point, we discussed whether we should visit a really lovely restaurant with a great product, but whose owners were accused of a particularly icky crime. One of Prague’s pastry shops is owned by a person Jan lovingly calls „The Voldemort of cakes“. The pastries are great, actually. We’ve never been there with a tour.
Final FIVE: it has to be run by people who are flexible.
„Oh, I didn’t mention I was gluten free? Yes, and we have a vegetarian in the group.“ No matter how many times we ask before the tour, there can still be surprises when we finally meet. (We get it - things change between the time you book and you go, or you book for a bigger group and things have changed for a family member you haven’t seen in a while.)
That means things can change, and while we preorder all the food in advance, we may need to change our orders later on. And that’s when we need flexibility from the restaurants, and sometimes even a tiny bit of creativity. Because we want to provide the best possible hospitality to everyone, which means sometimes we need the restaurants to do the same. (One of the deepest moments of quiet we’ve ever experienced was when we asked the kitchen of the meat-centric Čestr whether they could cook an ad hoc vegan meal for one of our guests years ago. You could hear a pin drop…. And they did prepare a meal for him.)
So this is how we choose the restaurants and other stops on our Prague food tours. Do you have any other questions you want to ask about the food tours we run in Prague? Anything goes; just send us an email and you may see your question answered in one of the future installments of this series.