Let us start with a confession: before the whole Covid thing, we had never ordered takeout food home. Ever. The whole idea of Taste of Prague was showing the best food and the best experiences money can buy in Prague, especially if you’re visiting from abroad, so ordering take-out food home would have defeated the whole purpose.
Well, a year into this goddamn pandemic, things are a bit different. If our math is correct, indoor dining was allowed in Prague for only 15 days out of the last 100 days, so if you ever found the need to eat during that time, you either had to cook, or order take-out. And while Zuzi is an amazing cook (have you seen our Instagram lately?), she also needs some rest. So take-out food has become a firm part of our reality.
Today, we’re going to look at some of our favorite take-out food options in Prague, but before we list them out, let’s set up some…
Basic rules of take-out
Support your local business
This isn’t just a cute hashtag you can use to feel better about yourself. Food always inevitably dsuffers during delivery, so ordering from a please near you (as opposed to a place from across the town) makes a lot of sense, quality-wise. A pizza from two corners away will arrive relatively unharmed. Now imagine Pizza Napoletana from across the town. It will be soup by the time it gets to you. Also, ordering from a neighbourhood place you want to see alive and well after this is all over just makes a lot of sense.
Take a walk
And if you’re buying locally, why not just take a walk and pick up? Delivery companies can charge extortionate amounts of money that cut deep into the restaurants’s margins, so skip that and show some love to your local restaurant and your body by taking a bit of a walk and pick up. You’ll love it and they’ll love it, too. And you’ll get a smidget of human interaction as a bonus.
Use your head
Let’s be honest here: some foods travel better than others. If packed well, a steaming bowl of ramen or Pho will arrive delicious and ready to eat. That Chicken Alfredo pasta or another creamy or cheesy sauce pasta? Foggetaboutit: the odds are it will arrive cold, with the fat separated. Good, sensible restaurants know this and have built their take-out menu around items that simply travel well.
Finish at home
One of the ways to overcome the inevitable decay of food as it travels is to buy a semi-finished product that you can finish at home. Some restaurants have really become good at cooking something nice and just stopping short of finishing it, doing all the heavy lifting in their kitchen while you just pat yourself on the back for putting a thing in the oven or a frier. What an amazing chef you are! Buying semi-finished products also puts you in control of the timing: with take-out food delivery, you often wait for the exact time of delivery and then immediately feel pressured to finish the food asap before it gets cold, a semi-finished product can usually be stored in a fridge and then finished and eaten whenever it’s convenient for you.
Make it nice
Do yourself and civilisation a favour and put some effort into plating. The fact that indoor dining is out and no-one can see doesn’t mean you can eat like an animal. Put your food on a plate. Open a bottle of wine. Put on some music that you like. Put that phone or laptop away. Wasn’t sharing a nice meal with someone you like what was indoor dining all about, anyway? You don’t have to throw it all away. That’s what the entire series of our Eating Alone Together dinners was all about - food is about experience and context. And even with take-out food, you have control over the context, so use it.
And now for our favourite take-out meals during the pandemic.
Restaurants that have been doing well during the times of the Covid are restaurants whose dishes were designed with an eye on delivery in the first place, whether that „design for take-out“ was conscious or not. That’s where one of our favorites, Vinohrady’s Kro Kitchen, shines. They were ready for delivery. Their dishes were designed for delivery. Even before the pandemic. (We visited Kro with a very famous restauranteur when they opened and he predicted their looming bankruptcy, not realising that delivery would be their stronghold.) What is also great about Kro Kitchen is that they cater to both meat lovers and vegetarians: their vegetarian svíčková now on the menu looks amazing, although we have not had it yet. And if you’re picking up the food, you can pop in the recently opened Kro Coffee next door and buy coffee and groceries, breads and such from the Kro Bakery, too.
Another restaurant whose food seems born to be delivered is Paprika, the Isreali/Middle Eastern bistro. The bonus here is that you always eat well at Paprika without ever feeling guilty - it all looks healthy and delicious at the same time: it’s a win-win. We really like their hummus - one of the few great versions in the city, their falafel or shwarma, and Zuzi’s a fan of their vegan shakshouka.
Pho and soups in general travel very well if packed well. We keep coming back to the slightly spicy Bun Bo Hue over at Banh Mi Makers and anything from Pho Bar, which has recently added a new location at Národní. Pho is a truly satisfying dish in the winter, but don’t skip the Bun Bo Nam Bo and other dishes these two Vietnamese eateries produce.
Kantýna is another restaurant we’ve been ordering quite a bit from. Their dishes have not been designed for delivery, that’s for sure, but they were able to adapt to the new situation through smart packaging and slight changes to the menu and the whole concept. Now they’re selling mostly ready-made dishes, to which you just add a side, or some charcuterie our meat from the store, and you’re done. We also really like their chlebíčky, their classic open-faced sandwiches.
Speaking of meat, the great people of Big Smokers offer beautiful BBQ sets ranging from small (they’re actually not that small) to really big, family-sized affairs). And Čestr has been selling amazing multiple-course steak dinner sets based on our cooperation as part of our Eating Alone Together series: the set includes fries with a bit of beef fat for fraying, steaks, their Perigord sauce and more. Yum! The bag comes with clear instructions. Finally, Dish Fine Burger Bistro has been known to sell their Dish Kit, a DIY kit for their city-famous burgers. This is again something we collaborated on as part of the Eating Alone Together series, and people had great results at home and loved it.
One last meat-loving tip: The Real Meat Society has an excellent online store that is a joy to use. They deliver meat, charcuterie but also cooked meals like their amazing meat pies, Scotch eggs or signature vanilla custard donuts. They also have an amazing delivery service that will deliver within two hours, city-wide.
When we crave classic Czech cuisine, we usually turn to two places. Výčep has a great svíčková, filled dumplings with sauerkraut, or fish & chips using local trout. We really like Výčep’s cooking, based on adding a modern twist on a Czech classic that is at the same time familiar and comforting on one side, and modern and edgy on the other. Now they have added items in their „koloniál“ store: things like rainbow trout caviar, smoked may or really great stocks you can buy for the home. Café Savoy has always been our place for schnitzel and potato salad, but now they’ve added things like great fries that can be truffled. They’ve also changed their menu a bit to add „fancy fast food“ items - they sell a burger now, along with things like fried cod in a bun. And again, Café Savoy is a place where you can buy great bread in addition to a hoot meal. One final place for Czech cuisine is U Matěje: they may be cooking for healthcare workers during the working week, but do offer nice weekend three-course meals for preorder.
We also have to mention Etapa, run by our friends Gabi and Peter (we’ve had not one, but two podcast interviews with them throughout the year). Having no rut to fall into (they opened just two months before the pandemic started), they hit the ground running when the first wave hit, and only improved since. What sets them apart is great customer service online - you know exactly what is happening and what is coming soon - when they’ll stock up some of our favourites like their amazing loupáky or a vánočka during the Christmas season… and their online shop is great has a loyalty program. You can buy something nice for yourself there to lift your mood - maybe a poster or a ceramic cup or so.
Final tips? We’d never order a pizza, but Pizza Nuova’s pre-baked, cooled and vacuumed pies of pizza Napoletana to be finished at home look truly enticing. Pizza Napoletana doesn’t travel well, but this looks absolutely cool and we’ll yet give it a try. Taro and Gao Den have also been doing some great stuff: Taro is a modern pan-Asian restaurant and we like their soups and curry, along with the three-course dinners to be finished at home over the weekend. Gao Den does more of a take on Vietnamese cuisine, and we do like their rolls or Pho. And Sia restaurant has a nicely designed Peking duck set to be finished at home, and we like the look of it a lot.
Finally, Myšák has a great online store that sells breakfast sets, buchtičky se šodó (rising dough buns with hot vanilla custard sauce, eggs any style, loupák brioche rolls, and, of course, a plethora of amazing desserts, and… wait for it.. a signature pack of Esíčka cookies named after Zuzi! A must buy, obviously.