Prague Food Blog
The best Prague food tips and Prague restaurant guide by Taste of Prague Food Tours. For more insight in Prague food, check out our Prague food tours and our Prague Foodie Map!
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
Yes, the days are getting longer and the temperatures are getting higher, which can only mean two things: the spring is officially here, and we can finally enjoy food and drinks outside! We love to sit outside if the restaurant and/or cafe allows it: you can get a tan (and after the long winter, we need some, seriously), eat some nice food or enjoy some drinks, and just carelessly watch the people walking by, which is probably our favorite past-time. It’s like watching theatre, so don’t judge us, okay? Also, there’s nothing like reading a book with shades and sipping a nice drink to go with it. Honestly. We’ve tried it and it’s great.
In the upcoming weeks, we will bring you one or two posts about our favorite places in Prague to eat and drink outside so that you can enjoy them during the relatively short summer season here in Prague. We start with our favorite cafes with outdoor seating areas.
As we like to say, research is the hardest part of our job. We have to visit new places when they open to see if we can recommend them or whether they are so good that we can actually steer our Prague food tours in an entirely new directions. Yes, we know, a truly horrible plight, but somebody has to do it. Now, to give you the fruit of our pain and suffering, we will - from time to time - post short notes on the places we have visited recently. These will be our opinions based on only one or two visits of fairly recently opened venues so they cannot be seen as full-fledged reviews. That said, let's start with three today.
OK, let’s face it. The Ice-Hockey World Championships are really a Tier II championship. It’s a tournament of the best ice-hockey players who play for teams that got kicked out of the Stanley Cup playoffs already. Also, early and mid May is not the time of the year you would associate with ice-hockey - or ice for that matter - but let’s not worry about that. The hockey is still good and the Czechs love the tournament, and this year it is held in Prague and Ostrava, Czech Republic!
Where should you watch the games? How should you behave? What to look for? Where to eat? Read on.
When Jan was small, he and his father used to visit the old Hamburk pub for Sunday lunches. It was not a beautiful place back then but then again, no pubs looked really that great in the 1980s under Communist rule. But Jan loved the maritime styling of the pub (referring, along with the pub’s name, to the fact that there was a river port with a direct connection to Hamburg nearby), with a big ship’s wheel under the ceiling as the main light in the room. It was a classic neighborhood pub with “regulars” hanging around the bar. A classic local pub of the Karlin district, a district with a “black soul”, the only “bad neighborhood” in town, a blue-collar worker, industrial neighborhood and a place when Jan’s father used to live.
We are not uncovering a secret hidden gem here: Hemingway Bar is arguably the most popular bar in town, and also one of the best ones. Getting in past 9pm when the bar stops taking reservations can take some time, but the wait is worth it: the bar is a great place to drink those woes away with class and distinction. (If you can't get in right away, just sign in. There's lots to do in the area.) It is also a fairly adult place that does focus on mixology. If you're in need of a meat market, look elsewhere. Order something from the cocktail menu, get a sample of their wide selection of rums, or just tell the bartenders what you fancy. And then just watch them work. We could do that for hours.
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