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!
One day, we will look back at 2023 as a fantastic year for the Prague food scene. A year when Prague finally left the covid years behind and moved forward. We have been running food tours in Prague for 12 years, and we have now been running a cosy bistro in Prague for less than 12 months, and let us tell you: people in Prague are hungry, and tourists have come back after the almost three Covid years with a vengeance.
So let’s get to it. What’s opened in Prague in 2023?
So with 2022 finally reaching its end, it is time to look back at some of the best Prague openings of the year.
2022 seems to have been a good year - it was the first year without any major covid restrictions that would have an impact on the food industry at large: no shutdowns, no curfews, no capacity restaurant restrictions. And as a food tour company that makes more restaurant reservations than most, let us tell you: people came back and ate like it was the end of the world. This was a busy year if you were a restaurant that had something to offer.
Yet it also seems to be a year without a truly great, game-changing opening - and we mean no disrespect to the fine, hard-working restaurants and venues mentioned below. 2022 was not a year that saw an opening that would redefine what people wanted to eat and drink and experience, you know, the likes of the first Lokál more than a decade ago, or Eska in 2015, or Kro in 2019, or MrHotDog or The Eatery… well, you know what we mean. Great restaurants opened. But the seas did not part.
We are still waiting for some interesting openings next year - Kro will open their Moskevská restaurant after some serious delays. The same people will open Alma in… May? And we’re still waiting for the seismic event that will be the opening of Mr Kašpárek’s new restaurant concept just opposite the Astronomical Clock on the Old Town Square. (We’ve heard some wild things, man.)
Anyway, here’s notable Prague openings of 2022.
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.
We have one rule whenever we travel: we visit the main sights early in the morning or late in the evening to beat the crowds, and see the other, more local things during the day. When we visit a city, we prefer to see how people live there today, and not necessarily how they lived there in the past. And Prague is no exception. Especially during the high season, we recommend getting up early, seeing the sights before all the other people get to see them, and then just walk and explore the surrounding districts. And the Karlin is a place you should not miss if you travel like us - it has a great local feel and great places to eat and drink. That is why we sometimes visit it with the guests of our Prague Foodie Tour and that is why we think it is worth a visit even during the off-season.
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?
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.
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.
Oh, what a year 2017 was. What started rather slowly has become, both for us personally and for Prague’s food scene in general, a year of excitement and hope. Here’s the year 2017 in review, as it relates to the Prague food scene.
(And yes, we did not know what picture to post as the title photo, so we put a pic from Maso a Kobliha with JJ's first hand modeling assignment.)
This post is really one long apology.
You see, if you’ve been reading this blog for some time, you may have noticed that the frequency of our blog posts has decreased in the past years. Well, „decreased“ is a nice way of putting it. We hardly posted anything this year. We’re sorry. We did not die, or split up, or go on a hunger strike. But there’s a reason for the silence, and a change is coming.
Ahhh, the joys of devouring a good steak tartare! One of the most feared - and later one of the most loved - dishes we order in the course of our Prague Food and Culture Tours, beef steak tartare is one of the most popular dishes eaten in Czech pubs and arguably the king of a specifically Czech category of foods found in many Prague restaurants: “snacks that go well with beer”. Forget about the naysayers and fear mongers. You should give it a try in Prague. Where and how? Read on.
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