So the new Prague Michelin guide is out, uncharacteristically in the autumn, but hey - anything’s possible in a covid year.
If you follow us for a while, you may know we love to hate the Prague Michelin guide. On one hand, it undeniably helps the businesses included, and you can’t argue with the heritage, but there are some very weak points about it - the writing is average at best (try to read a few to a Prague foodie to see if they recognise the restaurant), the categories are chaotic (whatever Eska serves, „traditional cuisine“ - as suggested by the Michelin guide - ain’t it), the results and the judging are anything but transparent, and the whole guide rarely sails off the beaten path. Read the whole rant here if you care. (It also includes more standard descriptions of the restaurants awarded a star or a Bib Gourmand.)
That said, whenever the French culinary deus ex machina descends on Prague once a year to tell it how it fares culinary-wise (read this sentence again just to get a real feel for how ridiculous this is), it is an event worth noting. So despite all the criticisms, we’re jumping on the bandwagon and comment on the results. So what changed since 2020?
Michelin stars in Prague
Prague still has two one-Michelin star restaurants: La Degustation and Field. Congrats to both!
Which one you should go to? That’s a question as old as time itself. (Namely the time when Field got its own star, adding the second star to Prague.)
The simple answer is: if you’re more adventurous, like natural wines and don’t mind not having a la carte options, go to La Degustation. If you prefer a la carte dining, like more conservative wines (or cocktails) and dishes that follow a more traditional protein-and-side template, go to Field. Both restaurants’ rooms are beautiful and comfortable (we like La Degustation’s darker and more intimate tones a bit better) and the service in both is nice and casual. The cooking at Field is rock solid, and especially the sauces can be a stand out. The cooking at La Degustation is more experimental, but the wine pairing to us is worth the price of admission alone. (And that non-alcoholic pairing is one of the best we’ve ever tried anywhere.)
Bib Gourmands in Prague
What is a Bib Gourmand, we hear you ask? Some people say it’s „half a star“ and that’s… not exactly right. The Bib Gourmand is awarded to restaurants gauged to be both good quality and good value by our team of Michelin Inspectors. Basically, restaurants may only receive a Bib Gourmand if they offer a three course meal under a certain price point, which is set based on local economic standards. So if a restaurant is super fancy or expensive, it will not eligible for a Bib Gourmand no matter how well they cook (in that case, they should be aiming for a star).
In 2020, Prague had three Bib Gourmand restaurants: Eska, Divinis and Na kopci. In 2021, the Michelin guide added two more restaurant to their Bib Gourmand list: The Eatery and Dejvická 34.
We expected The Eatery to get a Bib Gourmand award last year or the year before. It made sense - his lunch specials are some of the best in town and for great money, and Chef Býček’s cooking is rooted in Czech tradition while playing up to modern sensitivities. The restaurant is gorgeous and the wine list is one of the biggest in town (the restaurant runs a wine distribution operation as a separate entity). And Chef Býček already ran a Michelin-star kitchen as the Executive Chef of Alcron after Roman Paulus. In any case, this was well deserved and long overdue.
Now, the real surprise is Dejvická 34. Not that it’s bad - it isn’t. But it’s not an obvious contender - a fairly small Italian restaurant in the residential district of Bubeneč (that we call home) that never seems to have a line in front of it. That said, the pedigree is there - Chef Černý used to work in Prague’s first Michelin star Allegro, and then headed the kitchen of La Finestra in cucina, an Italian institution in Prague. The cooking and plating is definitely ambitious, but we wouldn’t necessarily call it „fun“. But that’s not a bad thing - if you need to impress conservative in-laws with fine-dining inclinations, this will be perfect. Anyway, this did come out of nowhere - congrats to Dejvická 34!
How about the existing Bib Gourmands? Divinis is a classic Italian restaurant in the Old Town, just steps from the Old Town Square. It’s the flagship of Chef Pohlreich, a local celebrity chef (think Gordon Ramsey, but Czech). We honestly haven’t been in years, but the awesome Petr, the Maitre d’ of Chef Pohlreich’s Next Door, swears the service is one of the best in town. But this can be a great place to get pampered for an anniversary, or a fancy dinner date.
Eska has become an institution - and in a way the perfect metaphor for, and reflection of, the Karlin district it is located in. It’s a modern Czech restaurant housed in a former factory for water heaters, where young, cool chefs cook dishes with local roots and foreign sensibilities, young staff bring it to the table, and young affluent diners devour it. Great wine list, too. Hana Michopulu, a Czech food writer and the founder of Sisters, a bistro for open-faced sandwiches, has called it „La Degustation’s economy class“, and it’s not that far off.
When Na kopci got its Bib Gourmand award a few years back, it was a surprise. No, it’s not bad - it’s just way out of the way. A long-time darling of some Prague foodies, Na kopci has managed to open and sustain what in reality is a destination dining venue - you probably don’t live in the area or need to drive through it. Locals love it and come back for some of their signature dishes like the size eat tartare. We honestly rarely went out impressed - we just thought the portions were huge and the food was nice but not extremely memorable. That said, perhaps we’re missing the point here - as we wrote, it is incredibly popular about the locals, so what do we know. (Whenever Jan sits there, he wonders whether he wallpaper, made of childhood photos of the owners, is a beautiful celebration of camaraderie and childhood, or a debatable monument to „Communist leisure“, and whether you can separate the two if you grew up in a Communist country. Deep thoughts.)
There’s one notable loss here: Sansho has lost its Bib Gourmand award. We blame it on Covid - the restaurant needed to appeal to a broader range of diners and has somewhat merged with the former icon that was Maso a kobliha (which was itself a holder of the Bib Gourmand award). But the fact is that while Sansho (oh, if you’re here for the first time, Sansho is a yummy Asian casual restaurant run by Paul Day of former Nobu glory) is still excellent and definitely worth a try, the menu hasn’t changed much lately. It’s not that Sansho got worse; it’s that the competition got better and Sansho now may not be the standout it definitely used to be back in the day.
New mentions in the Prague Michelin Guide 2021
The Prague selection has four new members, and they’re all great, actually: Výčep, Taro, Bockem and QQ Asian Kitchen.
It’s great to see a real Czech/Moravian/Wallachian pub with truly excellent cooking make it in the Michelin guide, and Výčep deserves it and more - we think that with a little tweaking (and more edits to the sometimes take-no-prisoners seasoning of Chef Hrachový), they could get a Bib Gourmand next year. Why the heck not? It’s also great to see a member of the Czech Vietnamese food community make the cut, and Taro, one of the most ambitious and classiest of them all, well deserves that spot.
It’s also nice to see Bockem in the Michelin guide. It’s a young team that does not belong to any big restaurant group and they’ve always did things their own way (they started as a restaurant that only served fixed 3-course breakfasts and closed by noon.) The room is absolutely beautiful and the dishes are great. Finally, QQ Asian Kitchen by Lee and Nyoman, two chefs who broke away from Sansho, a local Asian cuisine institution, serves authentic South East Asian cuisine in a nice, casual setting. Lee and Nyoman are the nicest guys who’d been friends forever, so it’s nice to see them included.
(Full disclosure: as of the writing of this, we run the social media of Výčep and The Eatery. That said, our business relationship does not oblige us to write favourably about them on our own outlets.)
Any contenders for the fguture?
So is anyone missing? We’d love to see El Camino Tapas Restaurant make the list, or at least the guide. Sure, it’s Spanish, but if two Italian restaurants can have a Bib Gourmand here, why a Spanish one can’t be included? (We don’t think they’d be eligible for a Bib Gourmand, though.) The cooking’s hard to fault, and the service can be the best in town.
Alcron, a former Michelin star holder, is now closed, but the Eponymous hotel still has a restaurant, the iconic La Rotonde. Now it’s headed by the super talented and experienced young chef Lukáš Hlaváček, and the results aree exciting. Michelin now lists CottoCrudo, a hotel restaurant. La Rotonde is undoubtedly better.
The Kro family will open a proper restaurant hopefully soon. Chef Václavík, the co-owner and executive chef, used to work in Michelin star restaurants up north, and his food tends to be delicious. So why not? (Of course, the place hasn’t opened yet, so we’re just basing this on many assumptions. And if Taro is in, why not Dian? The cooking is as good as Taro’s, and while the exteriors might be a bit uninspiring, the interiors surely are.
How about U Matěje? Hey, if Na kopci got a Bib Gourmand, U Matěje could easily get one, too: great local dishes from a kitchen run by an experienced chef, and a fine-dining dinner restaurant on top of that. And while we’re talking about hearty Czech cuisine with a modern twist, why not Čestr? The message and philosophy are strong, the cooking revolves around strong local produce and is rooted in Czech tradition, and the wine program is robust. And it’s a beautiful restaurant, too. So come on, Michelin!