prague food & drink

On the night I landed in Prague Jack and I decided to go to the restaurant in the hotel’s ground floor. They had stopped serving food, but they were still serving drinks, so we decided to grab a beer. As soon as we had gotten our beers, a friendly local Czech guy asked if we wanted to join there table. So we did. There were about half a dozen people at the table, but only two guys really knew enough English to have any sort of conversation.

One of them was a big guy with a big beer belly. He had visited China once before in his life, and when he was there apparently everyone wanted to touch his ears. So during the night he asked Jack several times if he wanted to touch his ears. The other guy was a skinny vegetarian guy, who apparently had visited Seoul once and liked Korean food a lot. I thought that was pretty random…

Anyways, at one point I asked them if there’s a Czech dish that I needed to try, and one of them mentioned to try the roasted duck that’s served with red cabbage. I ended up ordering it at one of the restaurants that we went to. I was kinda disappointed. The duck wasn’t very flavorful, and the potato dumplings were really dense and bland. It seems that a lot of Czech food is served with dumplings, of which there are two types, a potato dumpling and a flour based dumpling. I didn’t really like either of them, so for the rest of my time in Prague I tended to avoid dishes that came with dumplings…

I ended up eating a lot of soup, partly because they came with bread instead of dumplings, and partly because it was cold. Clockwise from the top left there’s a duck soup in a rye bread bowl, a goulash soup in a bread bowl, goulash soup with a cup of grog (a traditional Czech winter drink made of hot water and rum), and a pig blood soup with rice.

There’s a good amount of street food in Prague. Near the Astronomic clock we spotted this stand that had these huge slabs of pork rotating on a rotisserie over a wood flame. I returned later in the day and bought some. I was pretty disappointed– it tasted like a regular piece of ham that I could buy at Safeway.

Svarak, or hot wine, was fairly common. I rather enjoyed it, especially since it was so cold out for most of our time in Prague. The pastry I’m holding is a traditional Czech pastry called a trdelnik, which is cooked by wrapping it on a stick that rotates over a flame.

Food in general was kinda heavy in Prague, so at one point I decided that I’d wanted something healthy. So I ordered a salad. It was the best tasting salad I had ever had, although it failed at being healthy. It had a ton of ham and bacon and chicken, covered with cheese and dressing and croutons– there were a few pieces of lettuce and tomato thrown in too, mostly just there to garnish all the meat it seemed.

On our last day in Prague we decided to eat at a nice restaurant. There was a Michelin star restaurant at one of the fancier hotels in town, but they didn’t have a seat. So we ended up eating at the hotel’s other restaurant, which apparently was still one of the best restaurants in Prague. I ended up ordering the three course chef’s menu, which came with this fancy looking desert. I had never eaten anything like this before, I wasn’t quite sure how to tackle it.

This is becherovka. Apparently Czech people drink it to aid their digestion. After all the heavy food I ate in Prague, I could use a good digestive aid…