Where to drink in Prague

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Prague Foodie Map (2nd edition) out now!

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Prague Foodie Map (2nd edition) out now!

Oops, we did it again. (Oh, this never gets old. Thank you, Britney.) 

Yes, we’re happy to announce that the second, updated and improved edition of our Prague Foodie Map, our Prague food guide, is finally out. Our curated selection of the best restaurants in Prague, along with best coffee shops, bistros and bars in town.

The first edition sold out in less than six months (the recommendation in the Food & Wine magazine helped). The new, second and improved edition adds more tips and Prague travel advice, mostly based on two things: (1) our own travels, and (2) the most common questions that get asked on both of our Prague food tours.  

We travel quite a bit, and if you’re following us on Instagram (if you don’t, drop everything and do it now), you know it’s mostly for food. And we’ve always wanted to have a reliable, honest guide for each city we travel to, written by a local foodie. With things that only make sense to taste, and nothing more. A guide devoid of cliches and stereotypes. With tips that get you outside of the beaten path. Basically a guide a local would endorse. So we wrote one for Prague. And now you can have it, too.


Our favorite places for hot chocolate in Prague

Our favorite places for hot chocolate in Prague

We don't know about you, but when the summer ends, we say good-bye to our running shoes, waste any exercise we engaged in during the summer, and just focus on a steady diet of Pho, roast pork, buttery risottos and other comfort foods. Hey, the winter's coming, and that's not the time to fool around. You need to eat. Just ask our grandmas. 
But the gloomy, dark and increasingly short days have a positive side, too: the season for hot chocolate in Prague has officially begun. Talk about a silver lining. Here's the places we like to visit for our cup of the delicious - and highly addictive - stuff.


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?


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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.


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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!


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Our Prague Foodie Map is Out Now!

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Our Prague Foodie Map is Out Now!

A while ago, we wrote a post about our Prague Foodie Map. So? What’s up with it? 

Well, we have an announcement to make. The time has come. The map is ready. As of today, we have it ready for you, and you can find it in a few selected establishments we will reveal as we go. 

It’s an extension of our blog. On paper.


Best Cafés in Prague (2015) - Specialty Coffee Guide to Prague

Best Cafés in Prague (2015) - Specialty Coffee Guide to Prague

It’s funny how times change. A few days ago, a guest of our Prague food tours tweeted, having visited the Prague Coffee Festival, "Prague is becoming one of the world's coffee capitals.” Now, while this may be a bit of an exaggeration, the truth is that we are not longer traveling for great coffee outside of Prague. Oh no. Today, we are coming back to Prague for great coffee.  

Cafes in Prague have gone a long way in the past few years. While it was nearly impossible to get filter coffee in Prague a few years ago, today it’s an item that goes without saying. Acidity in coffee has become an accepted characteristic and the variety of styles offered in Prague is quite overwhelming. And while we had to cherry pick and travel for good coffee in Prague, specialty coffee in Prague has today entered just about every Prague’s district, if we discount the outskirts.

What is nice about third-wave coffee in Prague is the lack of attitude and pretentiousness. The community around specialty coffee is inclusive and wants to make friends, with very little foes and enemies within it. The baristas in general don’t have attitude and don’t ridicule the customers for lack of knowledge, instead explaining and helping them navigate Prague’s coffee culture.

This is the third edition of our little Prague Coffee Guide. We’re talking thirty good cafes, up from maybe less than ten some three years ago. We have divided them into three groups for you, depending on how much time are you spending in Prague, and how much coffee you want to drink: "Must-visits", the cafes you should not miss, “Other favorites”, the cafes we like to frequent, and “Other good cafes”, the cafes we visit when we’re in the area.

So, there you have it. What follows is our list of the Best Cafes in Prague.


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Introducing Taste of Prague Foodie Guide!

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Introducing Taste of Prague Foodie Guide!

You may have noticed we have been neglecting this Prague blog a bit. It’s a mix of various factors. First, we’re now in the middle of the high season for our Prague food tours, and our time to write about the nice places we’ve found is quite limited these days. Also, the heatwaves did not help. We get super lazy above 35C/95F, and honestly, you can’t blame us. And then there was another thing. A (not so) secret project, if you will.

It is not every day we get to introduce an entirely new product here. But this is the day. For a few months now, we have been slowly working on a small foodie guide for Prague. We’re 99% there, and with a bit of luck and effort, the guide will go to print next week. It should be ready and out some time in September. Question: have you ever worked on a project, spent seven days doing the first 80% and then the next seven months trying to finish the remaining 20%? This is that project for us. Trust us - we can’t wait to see it in print.


Prague Tour of Cool… Coffee

Prague Tour of Cool… Coffee

Don’t get us wrong. Summer is great, and Zuzi is a strong proponent of the idea that the monthly average temperature in Prague should be around 25C/78F all year round. But when it gets really hot, the high temperatures make it really hard to enjoy one of our primary passions and the fuel we need to get us going: coffee. 

Luckily, Prague cafes have been working hard to resolve the issue and are offering some interesting summer coffee specials. Virtually every specialty coffee venue offers cold drips, cold brews, iced filters and espressos, and we love ‘em. (Zuzi can’t seem to go through a single day without the shaken iced Aeropress at EMA Espresso Bar.) But you can also taste bona fide signature drinks that will get you cool, caffeinated, and sometimes a bit buzzed. And we like all these three things in the summer. 

To help you celebrate coffee in Prague in the summer months, we’ve created a small tour around Prague in search of great summer coffee drinks. You don’t have to worry about feeling tired. You just have a cool coffee drink in each stop. Problem solved. (And if you overdose on coffee, we’ve heard bananas help.)


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Prague local favorites: Veltlin

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Prague local favorites: Veltlin

The interesting thing about Karlin’s Holy Foodie Trinity, i.e. Muj salek kavy, Tea Mountain and Veltlin, is that none of these places are about food. But it still lures foodies from the entire town to enjoy great coffee, tea and wine. We do love the Veltlin wine bar for many reasons, the main one being the owner, Bogdan Trojak. Bogdan is a fascinating man: a poet, a writer, a winemaker, the founder of the “Authentic” (read “natural”) winemakers and the man behind the awesome Prague Drinks Wine festival. He’s also one of the nicest people on the Prague foodie scene.


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