Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep I: Julka a.k.a. Maskrtnica

Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep I: Julka a.k.a. Maskrtnica

If you have ever had any good food in Prague, the odds are you may have tasted some of the creations by Julka, otherwise known as Maskrtnica in the blogosphere. Julka has baked the first breads for the open-faced sandwiches in Sisters, and is the woman behind the Prague food phenomenon that are the vanilla custard donuts in Maso a kobliha. She’s also supplying bread to, and consulting breads with, a variety of great restaurants and bistros in Prague, and is one of the forces behind the Pecem Pecen project and the Sourdough Map, which have singlehandedly brought back the tradition of baking sourdough bread at home. So yup, she’s a big deal.

And it shows: we’ve tried to meet her for weeks now, after she’s come back from her 3-month tour of the US where she went through a series of short internships and visits in various artisanal bakeries, and still could not get a proper hour to sit down and have a nice chat. In between pop-ups, festivals and consulting, she’s that busy. And no wonder. If there’s one person that embodies bread in Prague, it is her (and perhaps Tomas at the Praktika bakery). So we’re happy that she at least shared her five favorite places in Prague, and her five favorite social media accounts.


Nase maso's Czech meatloaf recipe

Nase maso's Czech meatloaf recipe

You see, traditional Czech cuisine is all about guilty pleasures. You know you should not do it. You know it’s bad for you. But once in a while, when no-one’s looking, you just need a bit of sweet satisfaction from a pice of juicy pork belly or a crunchy schnitzel. It’s just so damn delicious, and nobody can stay so strong for long.

And the same goes for the meatloaf at the Nase Mase butcher shop. Meatloaf?!? Not the first you would order when you travel, but this particular meatloaf, juicy and tender and moist and beautiful, is - believe it or not - one of the most popular meals of our Prague food tour. Yes, we later visit other restaurants for fancy sit-down meals where you can inspect chefs’ tweezer work, but when we ask at the end what was our guests’ favorite meal, the meatloaf always gets a dreamy mention. It’s just that good. Heck, when Nase maso opened, the butchers held a competition for the best meatloaf recipe: each butcher would prepare their own, and the winning recipe would become the recipe of the butcher shop. Jirka Michal’s grandma’s recipe was the clear winner.


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?


Looking for new Tasters of Prague!

Looking for new Tasters of Prague!

This is a big one, but we'll keep it short.

Want to join us? Help us do what we do? Yes, we’re looking for new Tasters of Prague! Qualifications? You should be a nice, friendly person. And if you genuinely like to meet new people, that’s a bonus. You should like food. A lot. Oh, and English and Czech are a must. In exchange, we offer lots of fun. Job satisfaction. Okay, we’ll throw in candy, too. Oh yeah, and money, of course. Sounds good? Please fill in our short form! We’ll get back to you soon. And please share if you know someone who’d be great at this. Thank you! We can't wait to meet you. Really.


Best breakfast in Prague

Best breakfast in Prague

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.)


Our Tokyo trip

Our Tokyo trip

When we were planning the trip to Tokyo, we were approaching our stay with respect and a bit of caution. We were intimidated by the different culture, the impenetrable language and rigid customs. Having spent nearly a week in Tokyo, we must say the respect has grown, while the caution disappeared. We absolutely loved our stay in Tokyo. Staying in Tokyo gets you the thrill and excitement of seeing something new and different, and none of the intimidation of seeing something new and different.  

When we were planning our three-week Asian trip, we've reserved one week for Tokyo. What a mistake. We really would love to spend more time in Tokyo, and venture out into other Japanese cities, too. Oh well. Don’t repeat our mistake. If you’re planning a trip to Tokyo, reserve the time the city deserves. We’ve already promised ourselves we would be back. 


Best dishes in Prague in 2015

Best dishes in Prague in 2015

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.


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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.


Prague Restaurant Preview: Eska

Prague Restaurant Preview: Eska

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.


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