Soup in Prague is a life-saver when the fall hits the city: many foreign visitors end up walking more than they ever thought they would, and a bowl of hot, delicious, steaming soup is the best prevention of a ruin-your-travel cold. And the Czechs love a good soup: what Czech cuisine lacks in the appetisers department, it makes up for in the soups category. According to Chef Sahajdak, the executive chef of arguably the best restaurant in Prague, Czech food is all about sauces and soups. So where to go for the best soup in Prague? Read on.

We’ve said it once and we will say it again: picking the right place to eat or drink in Prague’s historical centre can be tricky. The thing is, most of the venues in the areas exposed to tourism are not really frequented by the locals and you have to cherry-pick them to find the good, authentic local spots. Prague can get very touristy at times. Just wait until you get here and you'll see what we’re talking about.

Luckily, there are a few places in the centre that are exceptions to the rule. One of them is the Dlouha street. Just a few steps of the madness that is the Old Town Square, with the Astronomical Clock that the locals are careful to avoid around the full hour (if you’ve been to Prague, you understand), the Dlouha street is a refuge that offers some great places to eat, meet and great with the locals. If you are in the Old Town area, you can spend nearly the entire day in the Dlouha street and its surroundings eating, drinking and even enjoying some culture and walks. Don’t believe us? Here are some of the options.

As you might have expected, we eat out a lot when we do research for our Prague food tours, the Prague Foodie Map and this very blog. (Hey, we have an Instagram account and we try to post a picture a day, which means a meal out a day. Yeah, it’s hard to be us.) But in doing so, we often see foreign visitors do things that clearly identify them as foreign visitors and set them apart from the locals.

So we have investigated the phenomenon, asked around some of our favorite restaurants and came up with a list of “Czech food fails”: things done to Czech food by foreign visitors that make the locals either shake their head in disbelief or straight out cringe. Here’s how you don't eat Czech food in Prague restaurants. 

For the past two years, the people behind Prague's Street Food Festivals have been working hard to create a very convincing impression that Prague actually has a street food scene, or street food for that matter. They’re at it again this year. And we love it.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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!

Where other restaurants come and go, Aromi has been a staple on the Prague dining scene. One of the first good Prague restaurants that could be called a "destination dining” place: more than just a mere neighborhood Italian place, Aromi has been attracting successful locals from near and afar despite being located in a residential district far from the areas exposed to mass tourism. It was also the place that gave birth to Riccardo Lucque’s empire of Italian-themed restaurants and bistros. And now, after ten years of its existence, Aromi has moved to a new location, taking over the space left by Sahara Cafe next to the Vinohradské divadlo theatre.