My new favorite lunch spot is Home Kitchen on Jungmannova. It's about the size of a large closet and only has a few seats, but it serves honest food made fresh several times a day. The menu changes frequently, with three different soups daily (I warmed myself up with a fantastic dill and potato version), a meat entree (like duck breast with rosehip sauce and gratinated potatoes), and a couple of vegetarian items (stuffed peppers or eggplant parmigiana with turnip purée). The cozy brick walls, pleasant service, and neat take-out packaging make Home Kitchen feel distinctly un-Prague-like (a more complete write-up can be found on Cuketka's blog).
I was very sad to
hear that one of our best and most innovative restaurants, Sofia Smith's Asian-inspired Angel, has apparently closed. Celèste, Angel's sister restaurant, is still open, and I recently had a great meal there -- the desserts were particularly awesome -- but Angel will be sorely missed.
More predictable, perhaps, is the closing of Le Cornichon, which was resurrected with a new chef after a hiatus last summer, but never managed to regain its buzz. La Casa Blu, meanwhile, is still fighting to renew its lease; updates can be found on its homepage.
As m
any of you know, I left my position as Lidove Noviny's restaurant critic at the end of last year (their farewell interview with me can be read here). I'll be putting the blog on hold while I pursue other passions and things. Thank you to all my readers, even the more vicious ones, for your support. You kept it interesting -- and kept me in check occasionally, too.
And if you find anyplace good to eat in this town, be sure to let me know.
photographs: homekitchen.cz, Tomáš Krist for Lidové Noviny, lecornichon.cz, Prague Spoon
Monday, February 1, 2010
Food news: Openings, closings, and goodbye Spoon
Friday, October 9, 2009
Las Adelitas to open restaurant in Vinohrady
Looks like Fosil will no longer be the only authentic Mexican restaurant in town.
The popular Mexican food delivery service Las Adelitas has announced it will open its first restaurant this month. There will be a grand opening party on Friday, October 16th -- but they are also holding a "pre-inauguration" party tonight at 8pm, at the new location on Americká 8 in Vinohrady. Delivery is on hold for now, but will restart as soon as the restaurant officially opens.
Margaritas and flautas... yum.
Monday, June 1, 2009
Restaurant Review: 7 Tacos
This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 09/05/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.
The first thing wrong with 7 Tacos is that they don't know how to make a taco.
From a mountain of iceberg lettuce and grated cheese, I excavated three rolled-up, deep-fried small corn tortillas. This sort of dish is generally known as taquitos, or flautas when they are made with wheat flour tortillas. It is a variation on the taco, yes, but a taco it is not.
I might have been more forgiving if "taco" wasn't the title dish of the restaurant. And it took me a little while to figure out where the number "7" came from. Was it the amount of tacos served on each
plate? The fact that the restaurant is in Holešovice? As it turns out, the 7 comes from the number of taco variations available: you can have them filled with either vegetables, chicken, pork, beef, shrimp, beans and bacon, or a dubious-sounding "caprese" mixture.
I went with the bean filling (105 CZK) – kidney beans in some sort of sauce with a little bit of bacon thrown in. Along with the aforementioned mass of lettuce, the taquitos came with refried beans and a scoop of dry rice. It wasn't terrible, which is more than you could say for the burritos.
Before the most offensive dish even arrived at the table, I was already having a bit of a guilty conscience. I'd convinced three friends to come out to far-off Holešovice (and one of them to drive me there) based solely on my promise that we were about to eat some really good Mexican food. I felt pretty confident about it because I'd read a positive review of 7 Tacos written by an apparent Californian – and if anyone knows Mexican food outside of Mexico, it's the people from Cali.
As it happened, one of my friends who came along is a Californian herself and something of a Mexican food connoisseur. She called me from the restaurant as I was on my way there. "Are you sure you want to eat here?" Uh-oh.
It seemed that the tortilla chips she had ordered were not only from the bag, but were covered in a Dorito-like spice mix. This, according to the Laws of Mexican Food, is illegal (not that you will find homemade tortilla chips anywhere in Prague, but these were of exceptionally bad quality). Unlawful, too, is the use of prepackaged guacamole (35 CZK for a small dish). Now, I don't know for sure that the guac had come from a jar, but the kitchen would have had to perform some serious alchemy to make fresh guacamole so perfectly smooth, green, and tasteless.
The pico de gallo (35 CZK), on the other hand, was fresh – at least relatively speaking. It consisted of chopped-up onions and tomatoes that were pretty much identical in color and equally lacking in flavor; either they were on the old side or they had been sitting around, chopped up and ready to be served, for a very long time. Other dipping delights included runny cheese from the can and, inexplicably, barbecue sauce (also 35 CZK each). The only authentic condiment in the whole place was the bottle of Cholula hot sauce that graced our table, good for combating the food's general blandness.
If it's done right, of course, Mexican food should be anything but bland. Try telling that to whoever puts together 7 Tacos's burritos. I didn't order one, but two of my companions did, one chicken and the other beef (155 and 185 CZK), and both declared them the worst burritos they'd ever had in their lives.
Why were the burritos so bad? The beef version was low on meat; there were just a few specks of ground beef in a tortilla filled mostly with a flavorless combination of cooked onions and bell peppers. There was a little bit of crunchy rice and a couple of beans. And then there was some pickled cactus – too much, apparently, because it made the whole burrito taste sour, like it had been dipped into the dregs of a pickle jar. I shouldn't have expected anything less of a Mexican restaurant that has řízek on its menu.
7 Tacos is located in the lobby of the Plaza Alta Hotel. To enter the restaurant, you walk through what feels like a cheap hotel bar, with its flatscreen TV, low tables, and tan leather armchairs. The dining area itself is decorated with the standard-issue Mexican restaurant gear: ponchos, tequila ads, a sombrero. There's a small children's playroom, which is nice until you consider that it is directly adjacent to the restaurant's smoking area. In case you were wondering, it is not worth coming to 7 Tacos for the atmosphere alone.
Yet again, a Prague Mexican restaurant had brought disappointment, even disgust, to me and my taco-craving friends. So the next night, we decided to correct our mistake. We went to Fosil – a restaurant that has already been discussed on this page at some length, so I won't go too far into my dinner there. But I will say that they have a new menu and the meal was very good. And although it isn't perfect, Fosil is definitely worth a try, if only to taste Mexican food made by real flesh-and-blood Mexicans (I have heard that the delivery service Las Adelitas, also run by Mexicans, is tasty, but I haven't been able to get a hold of them yet).
From now on, I only want to go to authentic Mexican places like Fosil. There are just way too many Czexican chefs in this town who think they can cook up great Mexican food using jarred salsa and some Vitana-brand tortillas. If I was in Mexico, I wouldn't trust some guy named Pepe to make me a good Czech meal from a can of guláš. And I'm not going to trust Jirka at 7 Tacos with my burrito, either.
7 Tacos
Ortenovo náměstí 22
Praha 7 - Holešovice
map
Tel: 220 407 011
Open daily 06:30-23:00
photographs: 1, 3, 4 Tomáš Krist for Lidové Noviny; all others 7tacos.cz
Monday, September 1, 2008
Restaurant Review: Cantina
This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 23/08/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.
There's Tex-Mex. There's Cal-Mex. And then there's what I like to call Czech-Mex.
Unlike Californian or Texan Mexican, Czech-Mex isn't an interesting interpretation of a national cuisine. It's a crude and sometimes inedible bastardization of Mexican food typified by canned ingredients, sloppy presentation, and that old Czech standby, cabbage.
I didn't see any cabbage at Cantina, the Mala Strana Tex-Mex joint I decided to review this week. But there was something much, much worse: squeeze-bottle chocolate syrup. Over turkey breast, rice, and beans.
Mole poblano is a Mexican poultry sauce made with a wide range of ingredients – some recipes call for up to 30 different components – usually including crushed chili peppers, tomatoes, garlic, nuts, various spices, and dark Mexican chocolate. Outside of Mexico, the mixture is known simply as mole, although in Spanish "mole" means "sauce" and ca
n represent a variety of condiments (guacamole means "avocado sauce," for example).
A true mole uses only a small amount of chocolate or cocoa bean; the idea is for the chocolate flavor to enhance the sauce, but not overpower it. The result should be dark and have a complex flavor. It's often difficult to discern the taste of the chocolate at all.
Not so with Cantina's version. After the waiter had brought my very unappetizing-looking turkey mole poblano (205 CZK) – the lumpy chocolate gravy had been carelessly slopped over the turkey and accompanying refried beans and rice – I tentatively dipped a fork into the sauce. It was sweet and chocolate-y. Sickeningly sweet and chocolate-y. In fact, it reminded me of something.
"Chocolate syrup," my friend declared with a grimace as she tasted the offending dish. "Definitely." As soon as she said it, I knew she was right. Not only was the chocolate sweet instead of bitter, but it was chocolate at its very crappiest – straight from the bottle.
If there were any doubts about the mole's major ingredient, those were quickly extinguished when I received my dessert (a supposedly Mexican-style chocolate cake, 80 CZK) and found that – surprise! – it had the same chocolate sauce squirted all over it. Minus the spices and chili peppers, of course.
Yuck. I barely touched that mole, but Cantina's waitress didn't seem to notice. I suppose she was too busy running around the restaurant, trying to serve all the customers who were piling in on a Tuesday night. That's right; even with food this awful, Cantina is consistently full. Luckily, I'd made a reservation, because there were would-be customers lined up at the doorway, trying to fight their way to a seat.
Why is this place so popular? For one thing, it has atmosphere. The burlap sacks lining the ceiling, Mexican music, and ponchos hanging from clotheslines draped across the room give Cantina an authentic flavor. And having been in business for over ten years now, it's established itself as the place for locals to go for Mexican food.
But Cantina is nothing less than an insult to Mexican cuisine (or Tex-Mex, since that seems to be more the style they're going for). The guacamole must have come either partially or completely from a can, because I could barely taste any avocado in it at all. The pico de gallo, at least, was freshly made, but it didn't taste of much. And the tortilla chips served with the two dips were covered in too much salt, as were all of the meats on the dishes I tried. The tacos were soggy, the burrito was sloppy, and the margaritas were overly sweet.
If Mexican food isn't prepared carefully and with fresh ingredients, it can be pretty terrible. So spare yourselves the trip to Cantina and try out Fosil, a small, Mexican-run restaurant I recently discovered on Bělehradská. It's not Tex-Mex or Cal-Mex, but it's simple, good food, real Mexican-style.
If you're looking for Czech-Mex, though, you know where to go.
Cantina
Újezd 38
Praha 1 – Malá Strana
map
Tel: +420 257 317 173
Open Mon-Sat 11:30-24:00
images: praguespoon.com, restauracecantina.cz
