Your grandpa knew it and we know it: to survive a cold winter day, you have to start with a proper breakfast. We mean, you know how much energy it takes to shiver, cry and think of the summer? A lot, that’s how many. So you need to get a big breakfast to start your cold, winter, helpless day.
You can see the places we like for breakfast in Prague in this post, but we probably eat our breakfast the most at Cafe Savoy. We actually have a routine: we book a place at the Savoy, eat our food there and then sneak out and have coffee at Cafe Lounge nearby. Neither of the two places know that we cheat on them with the other, so please don’t tell!
The Savoy ticks many boxes: the food is generally good and we wrote about their hot chocolate recently. Their Czech pastries are the best in town in our book and a look at the photo above will reveal that they use just the right quantity of butter for their scrambled eggs. With a mixed crowd of elegant, affluent locals, cool hipsters, expat families, dressy businessmen and New Balance-wearing tourists, it is a great place to people watch or simply relax and read a few articles from their wide selection of magazines and newspapers. Book one of their tables by the window for the best view of it all. Alright, their boiled eggs may not be always cooked perfectly, the staff may be stressed a bit at times, and your neighboring table might be too loud, but that’s alright with us. Nobody’s perfect. Except Ryan Gosling, maybe.
Cafe Lounge, stage two of our favorite breakfast routine, has perhaps lost some of its cool after EMA Espresso Bar, its younger and hipper sister, opened last June, but similar to James Brown, it is the hardest working cafe in show business and a serious workhorse: they open early and close late so you can get your coffee fix there any time between 7:30am and 10pm. And since Vojta, our favorite barista we will never bet money on because he always finishes second in latte art competitions, has come back and taken over the machine (he’s now ordered Barn coffee from Berlin with the tentative plan to replace their standard Union coffee), the coffee is now as good as it’s ever been there. So we order coffee, sit outside at the bench or inside, and get a medium-hard sudoku battle going on (ask at the bar).
By the time Jan finishes his victory dance, we get warm enough and have the energy to head off. The French toast is not going to walk itself off, will it? We like to walk up the Petrin hill (ok, we take the funicular) and brush past the Strahov monastery to get to one of our most favorite places in town: Novy svet, or the New World. We did write about the local cafe recently, and it does disappoint in the winter, either: it is warm and cosy and the tea is hot and makes it hard to leave. But we did leave, eventually, and take the tram from the Brusnice stop to our next destination. But more on that tomorrow….