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Prague off the beaten path: Dlouha street

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Prague off the beaten path: Dlouha street

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.


Common mistakes when traveling to Prague, a.k.a. "It's your own fault"

Common mistakes when traveling to Prague, a.k.a. "It's your own fault"

Here at Taste of Prague, we have this secret competition with Vienna: we want all the guests of our food tours, and all the visitors to Prague, enjoy our city more than Vienna. Not that we have anything against Vienna. We actually love that place. But still, when many of our guests visit Prague, Vienna and Budapest within the same trip, we want them to enjoy Prague the best. It’s just the way we are. Competitive.

But some Prague visitors don’t make it easy. Their Prague stays are riddled by what we would see as traveling mistakes. (We wrote about some don'ts of Prague already.) And then they complain about Prague. And we’re sad. And angry. Yup, it’s an emotional rollercoaster here at Taste of Prague whenever someone dares criticize out home town. 

To avoid that, we have put together a short list of what we think are the main mistakes we’ve seen visitors to Prague make, and how and why to avoid them. We hate to be haters, but hey - nobody disses our town on our watch!

So drop that pretzel, push away the pork knuckle, and read on. Here’s what you don’t do during your stay in Prague.


Prague off the beaten path: Bethlehem Square and its surroundings

Prague off the beaten path: Bethlehem Square and its surroundings

Calling an area this central “off the beaten path” can be quite daring, but we think the stretch of the Old Town between the National Theatre and the Charles Bridge can offer a truly authentic, local experience, with many venues frequented more by locals than foreign visitors. You see, most of Prague’s visitors move between the two bridges along the river bank, which surely is beautiful, but sadly bypasses some hidden, shady streets just a block away from the river that can offer some nice culinary and shopping opportunities. 

And on top of that, this area, which takes the total of some 15 to 30 minutes to explore at a leisurely pace, is just utterly beautiful, with a nice, quiet atmosphere that can be enjoyed literally seconds from the madness that is the Charles Bridge. Just a few steps away, you have an area where you can fall in love with Prague all over again, have a breather or contemplate the day in some of the nicest cafes and bars in Prague, and talk to the owners of some of the nicest and cleverest shops in the entire city. What follows are our personal tips for the area.


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How not to eat Czech food

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How not to eat Czech food

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. 


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Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep II: Ondra Hurtik

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Prague Food Tips and Recommendations by Prague locals. Ep II: Ondra Hurtik

If you like coffee in Prague - and you should, it’s awesome - then Ondra Hurtik needs no introduction. The reigning Czech barista champion and the runner up of the 2015 Coffee in Good Spirits competition, Ondra has been a prominent figure on the Prague coffee scene for years. And as one of the faces of the ubiquitous Doubleshot roasters, he can be mostly seen behind the espresso machine of Kavarna Misto or Muj salek kavy, unless he’s training in Doubleshot’s barista training centre in the Karlin district.

What are his favorite places in Prague? Where does he like to go and - most importantly - what is his favorite cafe in Prague? Our summer intern Nicole has interviewed him a while back, as he was training for the World Barista Championships in Dublin.


Where to stay in Prague?

Where to stay in Prague?

Sure, we may run what we think are the finest Prague food tours, but that does not mean we don’t get asked about where to stay in Prague. We do our best to help by inviting our guests to send us a shortlist of the hotels or apartments they have chosen and then give them our two cents on each of their choices. We love to travel, so we like to think we’re in a good position to combine our local knowledge with some of our travel know-how.  

With this post, we want to help you understand the different areas of Prague and their pros and cons. When we travel ourselves, we always look for a balance between easy accessibility to the centre of the town and getting a feel for what we think is a local, true, and interesting part of the city that we visit. So, we will be recommending areas along those lines. We will also throw in a few apartments and hotels we ourselves would like to stay in if we travelled to Prague. And yes, some of these recommendations will be based on our personal experience. (Which is gained when you do non-simultaneous house swaps, rent your own rental apartment and have to book a hotel in your own city because you promised someone to stay in your apartment while you're in Prague.) But don’t worry, we will not push our beautiful, awesome and super cool rental apartment in Prague that has no peers too hard. Oops.


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?


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