We dread the „Year in review“ articles. „Oh, nothing has opened this year. What are we going to write about? Prague is not NYC, you know? It’s not like something new opens every week. Jeez, this is gonna be boooooring!!!!“ Oh well.

But then you start counting. What the heck? 48 new places worth a mention? And we’re pretty sure we forgot a few. Which boils down to nearly… wait for it… one opening every week. Yup. Hold our beer, NYC! Prague coming through! Well, obviously, we’re not there yet, but in hindsight - and despite the perceived lack of „major“ openings, 2019 was a great year for the Prague food scene. Food and coffee in Prague flourished last year, and we could honestly write a separate version of our Prague Foodie Map just covering the openings of 2019, and it would still be a decent guide. Let’s keep that going in 2020. 

What follows is a list and a small description of the new openings on the Prague food scene in 2019, followed by a handy map and a “cheat sheet” - a downloadable and printable checklist of the 2019 openings to brag to your friends how many you’ve covered so far.

Spoiler alert: If you’re spending Christmas in Prague and are reading this in December without a reservation for Christmas Eve dinner, you’re already screwed. Panic and/or stock up on food now.

Prague dining used to be so easy. When we started our Prague food tours back in 2011, we could make reservations for a tour hours before, and restaurants would have a table. While this all has changed and now you need to book sometimes well in advance for the popular restaurants and hours in Prague, even back then there was one exception: Christmas and NYE. That is why, from the very outset of this blog, we have been compiling an annual overview of Prague Christmas and NYE dining options, and this is the 2019 edition.

In an ideal world, Hana would have been the first team mate we would have hired. We did talk about her joining us waaaay back when Taste of Prague was just Zuzi and Jan. But we don’t live in an ideal world, and Hana was not ready to leave the big law she was practicing at the time, just like Zuzi did a few years before. Fast forward five years later, and we are incredibly happy to welcome Hana to our small team. She will fit in like a glove - she loves food and other people’s company. She still does practice law a bit, though. (Remember, not living in an ideal world?)

There is something about Hana. She has a calming, soothing presence, and you just can’t help but feel good when she’s around. She’s a great listener with heaps of empathy, and when she talks, you listen. We also assume she hates being bored: she’s a well-travelled fan of food, wine and coffee, an avid skier who likes to bike and hike, and has a keen interest in architecture and urban planning. Oh yes, and movies. You know, the smart kind.

What we’re trying to say she’s busy. Or crazy. One of those two things. But never mind her schedule, she was super quick to give her tips for her five favorite places in Prague and five social media accounts, and not one, not two, but four (!) secret tips for Prague. But that’s just Hanna being Hanna. So here we go!

So the day has arrived and we are happy to announce the third itineration of what our moms, and the voices inside our heads, say is by far the best food guide to Prague - the Prague Foodie Map.

This version did not come easy to us. Originally scheduled “before Christmas”, it took us over half a year to finish. And let us tell you, a lot of things can happen in six months on Prague’s food scene, which has led to many, many, many rewrites. This was the first full version we wrote as parents, and in many way, the process showed. But at the end of the day, we feel that writing the guide as parents has added a completely new dimension that the guide lacked before. (And no, we’re not talking about sleep deprivation.)

Let’s be honest here: you did not travel to Prague to eat Italian. You want traditional Czech cuisine in its best form, and you want it right now.

But what are the classic Czech foods and where do you have them? Well, one way to find out is to book our Traditional Czech Food Tour, where we serve Czech classics that are close to achieving the impossible goal of matching the deliciousness that our beloved grandmas used to serve us when we were kids (albeit with a modern twist - don't expect tourist cliches from us).

Cannot join us for a few hours of serious overeating and fun stories about what these foods mean to us? Then there’s the Prague Foodie Map, the next best thing if you want to see Prague and its food and culture through our eyes.

Okay, enough with the shameless plugs. You want free stuff. Here’s a list of classic Czech foods and our favourite Prague restaurants for traditional Czech cuisine that remind us of our childhood. Before you follow these, beware: Czech food is delicious, comforting, very filling and addictive, so make sure you reserve enough time to walk off those calories. Yes, there won’t be many salads - or vegetables for that matter - in the list that follows. But you did not travel to Prague to eat salad, right? What? You did? We pity the fool.

When we started our Prague food tours in 2011, the hardest thing was finding a decent place for Czech pastries. Just like the chefs tended to cheat a lot with the ingredients under the Communist rule, pastry chefs were no different, and even the consumers had pretty low standards up until a few years ago (witness the popular “Hera means baking” campaign by a big margarine producer). We would literally have to buy pastries somewhere before the tour and bring them over to the restaurants we were visiting, bribing the wait staff with favors and smiles to let us serve them there, while the chefs and managers were refusing to bake their own on the assumption that Czech pastries were “too common”.

Which is a shame. The Czechs are famed to have been the pastry makers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with a long and proud tradition of baking and French-inspired pastry making. And the fact is that Prague is full of pastry shops frequented by locals. The problem is most of them are not exceptional. Prague still lacks places like Cedric Grolet’s Le Meurice in Paris, and while Prague has its star chefs and star butchers (oh yeah, we like our meat), we are still waiting for star pastry chefs to pop out (with, perhaps, the notable exceptions of Mr Skála and Ms Fabesová).

That said, Prague has some great pastry shops that will make you reasonably happy and quite unreasonably fat. So if you have a sweet tooth and are on the lookout for pastry shops and pastries in Prague, we are here to help. This is our guide to the best pastry shops in Prague. You live only once, right?

So the 2019 Michelin guide for Main Cities Europe is out, and the Michelin star restaurants in Prague have been given for the year to come. Which Michelin star restaurant in Prague is the best for you?

Here’s the executive summary:

Prague has two Michelin star restaurants: La Degustation and Field. La Degustation is set menu only, Czech food for foodies with an open mind. Field is a la carte, with international touches. Four Bib Gourmands in Prague: Sansho, a casual Asian-fusion restaurant, Eska, a modern casual Czech restaurant with fairly fancy dinners in a remodeled factory in the gentrified Karlin district, Divinis, an Italian restaurant run by a Czech TV Chef, and Na kopci, a local favorite that serves French-inspired joie de vivre big-portion dishes..

Want to know more? Can’t decide which Prague Michelin star restaurant is the best for you? Read on.

Confession: we have been bitching about Prague food scene’s development probably for a better portion of 2018. Not enough places are opening, some great places are closing, and where’s the innovation? While Prague lost a Michelin star and a Bib Gourmand award in the spring, the world lost Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold, and generally, the mood here at Taste of Prague was fairly low. (Only to be lifted by the shenanigans of JJ and Lola, the two newest members of the team.)

But looking back at the year, things look a bit more rosy now in hindsight, thanks mostly to what can be described as a strong finish. (And the pills may have finally kicked in too.) 2018 was a year that has solidified some of the trends we have had seen before. People in Prague like to go out. A lot. Booking great restaurants for our Prague food tours has become a game of long-term strategy, and booking for last-minute enquiries nearly impossible. Don’t believe us? Look at Instagram videos from Dva kohouti, which opened in December. It’s been hopelessly full from opening up until Christmas. Whatever the concept, people seem to jump on it, at least for now.

Also, 2018 saw consolidation, as two new groups seem to have emerged to challenge the market-leading, and, in a way, defining behemoth that is the Ambiente group. Czech diners want common sense, quality and transparency if they are to spend top dollar, and seem less prone to jump on hype. So when an all-avocado restaurant opens, the logic of opening a restaurant based on produce that is in no way local and has to travel the world to get here is questioned online, and when a new rotisserie chicken place opens and serves chickens from a large, industrial chicken farm, they are called on that, too. That said, both of these places seem to be prospering at the moment, so we’ll see if this awareness manifests itself only online, and not in… ahem… real life.

So you may have heard that everything shuts down on Christmas Eve in Prague and the Czech Republic. Totally true. Christmas Eve is the only day of the year we do not run our Prague Foodie Tour, and the biggest holiday on the Czech calendar: most people stay at home with their families, only for things to revert back to some degree of normality on December 25, and fully on December 27, which is a regular working day.

Which means if you want to eat out on Christmas Eve, options exist, but are limited. And if you don’t have a booking already, you should act now. Okay, don’t panic: restaurants, especially in the historical centre, will be open and cater to tourism, but if you want to be smarter about your Christmas dinner plans, here’s our Prague Christmas dining guide.

If you want to see the Sapa market, you want to see it with Marcela - project manager by day, Vietnamese food tour guide by… ehhhh… day, too (but mostly on weekends). Warm, friendly and passionate about food, she is the perfect companion to what at the beginning might seem like an impenetrable maze of warehouses and hole-in-a-wall pho places. (Did we mention she’s beautiful, too?) Heck, she gave us her own tips when we wrote about the market, and they have never failed us on our own visits.

Born in Vietnam yet raised in the Bohemian town of Chomutov (“No-one comes from there,” she claims incorrectly, not knowing that Zuzi was in fact raised there, too.), she has a unique insight into both Vietnamese and Czech food and culture, and isn’t afraid to share it. What started as cooking Vietnamese dishes for her friends (and she has many, often recruited from young fashion and design circles) eventually snowballed into one of the most popular tours to Sapa. She also seems to be travelling all the time, which we often observe on social media with thinly disguised envy. So yes, we like her, and we think you’d like her too. Here’s her five faves for Prague and social media.