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

Read More...

Summary only...

Restaurant Review: Zlatý Anděl Fusion

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 16/05/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.

Here's a handy rule of thumb to use when choosing where to have your next meal: when a restaurant has its lunch menu written on its windows in green and orange marker, it's probably a good place not to go. The marker-on-the-window thing stinks so potently of desperation that I've heard a friend of mine refer to it as "the mark of death" – something akin to the symbol they used to draw in chalk on the doors of infected houses during the time of the bubonic plague.

This tacky practice has become so popular that it's pretty difficult nowadays to find a restaurant in the center that isn't covered in fluorescent cloud shapes and the price of roasted pork knuckles. So I was willing to give Zlatý Anděl Fusion a shot despite its copious use of war paint – particularly because its head chef, Martial Clement, had wowed me last year at his previous post, Zahrada v Opeře.

A fully-renovated Dům U Zlatého Anděla had sat empty for over a year before finding an occupant, a local outpost of the Spanish chain Barceló hotels. The hotel might be filling up, but its restaurant has been largely ignored by locals and visitors alike; the long main part of the dining room, packed with closely-set tables and chairs, was empty and almost dark when we arrived. We sat in the front café area instead, a somewhat livelier space with large windows facing the street that nonetheless feels very much like a part of the adjacent hotel lobby.

I tried to speak with the maitre d' in Czech, but he apparently did not speak a word of the local language. His English was only so-so – he sometimes appeared to have trouble understanding us and explaining himself. I wondered if this was a restaurant meant exclusively for Spanish speakers. A few of them appeared during our meal, and the waiter chatted with them at length while we waited for our soup spoons.

They never came, so I used a fork to eat my coconut velouté with crab ravioli (190 CZK). I didn't care all that much because the soup was completely tasteless, like I'd imagine coconut milk to be if it was watered down and thickened with flour. The ravioli was filled with a solid mass that didn't seem to have much to do with crab, and the calamari it came with were rubbery. My companion's mozzarella salad (270 CZK) was even worse: it was nothing more than a pile of dry mesclun, a soggy half-ciabatta covered in melted cheese, a strip of uncooked bacon, and a thin slice of zucchini.

This was not what I expected from Mr. Clement, whose carefully arranged, flavor-packed dishes at Záhrada stand out in my mind as some of the best I've tried since I started writing this column. I would even venture to say that the main course I had at Zlatý Anděl was one of the worst dishes I've ever had in a restaurant above the III. skupina.

I'm talking about the veal tournedos (450 CZK), which were as tough as well-chewed chewing gum and completely unseasoned – unless you count the black charring that scarred both sides of the meat. The accompanying carrots, zucchini, and mushrooms had been burnt mercilessly, too. It was like eating a big lump of coal with little lumps of coal on the side.

Other culinary highlights included a freezer-burnt tuna steak (450 CZK) and a risotto "Arborio" (390 CZK) that was not made with Arborio rice. It did contain carrots, zucchini, and some waterlogged shiitake mushrooms, the same combo of vegetables that graced my dinner plate. The key ingredient to risotto besides rice, parmesan cheese, was missing entirely.

The one good dish we had all evening was the chocolate fondant (150 CZK), served with coconut ice cream, black currant foam, and mango sauce. Unfortunately for me, I had chosen the profiteroles for dessert. They were filled with a watery, unsatisfying vanilla ice cream. Because my companion's order of homemade gelato included a very different version of vanilla, I suspected the profiteroles hadn't been made in-house.

Along with these gastronomical atrocities came some almost comically incompetent service. When we asked for our Gavi to be chilled, the waiter put it in a bucket with a little bit of ice and no water, a method that ensured the wine would not have cooled had we sat there all night. He then proceeded to dole out the lukewarm wine, always first to the man and then to the women – a definite no-no in any half-decent restaurant.

The servers were pretty friendly, but seemed to lack any kind of common sense or courtesy. Two of us refused the slices of bread we were offered (it was just bone-dry Šumavský chleba, after all), only to find out a minute later that the bread was necessary in order to eat the amuse-bouche – a dish consisting of olive oil, two olives, and a slab of butter. When we started to get cold and tried to close the unwieldy French doors that were open right next to us, the waiter saw us struggling and didn't offer to help. And for a quarter of an hour I watched, fascinated, as he repeatedly walked around a customer's sweater that had fallen onto the floor from the back of his chair. At least he didn't walk through it, I guess.

You kind of expect these luxury hotel restaurants to be not all that great. But this bad? With that chef? Oh, Prague, dear Prague; the depths of your culinary hell never cease to surprise me.

Heed the window paint on this one: avoid it as you would the plague.

Zlatý Anděl Fusion Restaurant & Café
Barceló Old Town Praha Hotel
Celetná 29
Praha 1 - Old Town
map
Tel: 222 337 807

Open Mon-Sun 12:00-15:00, 19:00-00:00

photographs Pavel Wellner for Lidové Noviny; all others barcelo.com

Read More...

Summary only...

Restaurant Review: Radost FX

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 25/10/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.

When winter time comes around, most of us do our best to keep ourselves from getting sick. We wear scarves. We take extra vitamins. We may even go to the doctor's office to get flu vaccinations.

I am just as diligent about avoiding the restaurant at Radost FX. I don't often lie, but when it comes to that particular spot, I am not above fabricating an aunt's 60th birthday party or a sudden attack of the shingles. Believe me, if there was an anti-Radost shot, I'd be the first in line.

But just as some of us will still come down with the flu despite our best efforts, I sometimes end up getting dragged to Radost.

My friends, you see, will not heed the sound advice of the restaurant critic ("That place SUCKS"), because they always have a very special reason to go there. Somebody doesn't eat meat. ("It's not the only vegetarian place in town," I argue.) They serve brunch. ("Are you out of your mind? Have you SEEN the French toast?") It's late and we're hungry. ("Oh… all right." There really isn't anywhere else to have a sit-down meal in this city after midnight.)

The fact that I am something of a food snob is not the only reason I refuse to eat at Radost. I'm also trying to protect my and my friends' health and general well-being.

It could just be hearsay, but Radost's food does have a reputation for making people ill. Besides the various discussions of this topic on the internet, I personally know several people who have gotten sick after eating there. Even just this past week, a friend who accompanied me on one of my visits said she felt not very good at all after eating one of the restaurant's beloved Popeye burgers (the "burger" part is made out of spinach, hazelnuts, garlic, and cheese, in case you were wondering).

Far be it for me to know exactly what's going on. But I would like to point to the eyewitness account of a buddy of mine as a possible (partial) explanation. My friend was at Radost early in the day and saw the chef taking a batch of produce from the delivery man. The chef shook the hand of the delivery dude, brought the veggies into the kitchen (separated from the dining room by only a curtain, so it's possible to glimpse inside), and without washing his hands proceeded to chop up the tomatoes and put them on a plate for a customer's salad. And then, as an afterthought, he grabbed a slice of tomato from the plate and popped it in his mouth.

With standards like these, it's no wonder people are getting sick.

Of course, there are a lot of restaurants in this town with questionable hygiene practices – more, probably, than I'd care to know about. But even if the food at Radost isn't regularly groped by dirty hands, it's still presented as if it was. All of the dishes come out looking carelessly made and sloppy.

Take the Heaven's Garden dish (195 CZK), another supposed favorite of avid Radost-goers. It's basically a plate of mashed potatoes smothered in a dull cream sauce and topped with random vegetables: carrots, zucchini, mushrooms, red and green peppers, parsley, black olives (what?), and sun-dried tomatoes (why?). Some of the carrots were shredded, others were julienned. It's as if they just threw in whatever scraps they had lying around the kitchen.

The ratatouille (190 CZK) may be even worse. When I tried it, the vegetables were inexcusably overcooked, to the point where it was nearly impossible to tell the difference between the eggplant and the zucchini because both were so mushy and brown. The zucchini had been lazily cut into five-centimeter-long cylinders. The couscous that came with the ratatouille was bone dry; it must have been made the day before and stored improperly afterwards. And spooned on top was a nonsensical serving of sour cream. As if that would make this pile of slop worth the money.

I guess laziness rules at Radost. On my first visit, the waitress took a drink order from my friend without asking the rest of us what we wanted, then brought the drink and still didn't ask. On my second visit, my brother, who has a serious peanut allergy, asked a different waitress if there would be peanuts or peanut products in his stir fry. She said she wasn't sure and she would find out. She didn't. My brother got sick.

What more can you expect from a restaurant where my friend (the same unlucky lady who ate the foul Popeye burger) once found a big piece of glass in her salad? That may have been a few years ago, but judging by my recent experiences there, I still wouldn't put that kind of insanity past this place.

What confuses me most is the fact that so many people continue to eat at Radost. Some even swear by it. A Hollywood actor once took me there on a miserable date because he refused to eat anywhere else the whole time he was shooting his movie in Prague. He even had Radost food delivered to the set every day.

Okay, so I guess the interior is kind of cool, with the brightly patterned couches and funky wallpaper and quasi-trendy dance music provided by live DJs on the weekends. The restaurant feels like an extension of the club downstairs – all the more so because of the cigarette smoke and the fact that customers have to use the dank and dirty club toilets.

But even if you're enticed by the shabby chic décor and the promising-looking menu, even if you're a vegetarian and you want brunch or it's late and you're hungry, don't do it. I, for one, plan on never getting dragged to Radost again.

And after this review is published, I won't even have to come up with an excuse.

Radost FX
Bělehradská 120
Praha 2 - Vinohrady
map
Tel: +420 224 254 776

images 1, 4, 5: Tomáš Krist for Lidové Noviny; 3, 7: radostfx.cz; all others: Prague Spoon

Read More...

Summary only...

Restaurant Review: Flambée

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 17/05/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.

I could have guessed how bad it was going to be from its website. “Some experiences are more memorable than others,” Flambée’s home page declares atop an endless loop of piano mood music.

My night at Flambée was definitely one to remember – but not, I suspect, for the reasons the restaurant would hope.

I can’t remember the last time I ate an expensive meal that was this terrible. When Flambée first opened fifteen years ago and competing restaurants were few and far between, a dinner like the one I had recently might have passed as a high-class meal – in the post-Communist Eastern bloc, anyway. Today, the pseudo-gourmet cuisine, tired interior, and astronomical prices amount to nothing more than a tourist trap unworthy of even the lowliest tourists. How could anybody still be convinced to visit this overblown rip-off of a culinary dungeon, especially when Prague now boasts so many restaurants that are far better and less expensive?

The “dungeon” part might actually have something to do with it. Flambée’s big claim to fame (besides its vast wine collection) is its location in an 11th-century cellar, complete with big stone archways and gloomy candlelight. Atmospherically-inclined tourists and men wooing impressionable dates probably see this as an attractive setup. And it could be, if almost everything inside it wasn’t so horrifically unattractive.

At a restaurant where the average entrée price is 900 CZK and the wine list offers several bottles in the 100,000 CZK-plus range, one would expect the interior to be put together with a fair amount of consideration. But from the string of Christmas lights adorning a mirror to the sad little potted plants propped up against a wall and the stained white tablecloths, the details at Flambée seem haphazard and shoddy. Instead of piano music on the night I was there, we were treated to a Sting Greatest Hits CD. The other major aural stimulus was the loud peeing sound made by water trickling into a hideous cast-iron fountain in the middle of the dining room.

This place is in need of a serious makeover, but don’t expect one anytime soon: Flambée still proudly notes the interior design award it received back in 1994 -- along with various other by now meaningless recognitions -- just about everywhere it can.

In case those restaurant guide logos fail to impress, someone’s put together a ubiquitous summary (outside the restaurant, in the bathrooms, etched in gold on the menus) of all the celebrities who’ve ever had the misfortune of dining at Flambée. Among them are Meryl Streep, Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, The Rolling Stones, and Pink Floyd. Never mind that most of these stars visited Prague at a time when there was barely anyplace else for them to go. As far as Flambée is concerned, the Czech culinary landscape hasn’t changed one bit since they first opened.

But by underestimating the sophistication of their clientele – and that of the restaurants they compete with – Flambée is making a big mistake. They’re rapidly developing a reputation for overpriced, substandard food, and based on my experience there, the bad rap is well-deserved.

Let’s take the scallops appetizer as an example. The fact that the scallops were very small would have been all right if they weren't also undeniably smelly and fishy-tasting. For 790 CZK, then, my companion was served an inedible plate of miniature mollusks, along with an unexciting celery root salad and an out-of-place oxtail confit.

My first course, a “cappuccino” of lettuce leaves with quail breast and tarragon gnocchi (295 CZK), was edible, but only barely. The frothy soup tasted only of salt, and the quail meat was bland and tough. Although neither of us finished our appetizers, the hollow-eyed, depressive-looking waiter didn’t seem to notice or care.

For my entrée, I’d attempted to order the bison steak (mostly to see if it could possibly be good enough to warrant a 1200 CZK price tag), but was told the dish wasn’t available that night. I instead chose the wild hare baked with nuts and thyme (790 CZK), accompanied by a Bordeaux reduction, chestnut puree, and blood sausage. In both taste and aesthetic, this was a very ill-advised combination of ingredients. The whole plate was made up of varying shades of brown, and it tasted that way, too, without even a hint of freshness to brighten up a very rich, gamey dish. Like the quail, the hare meat was tough, and it was rolled in crushed walnuts, which didn’t go especially well with the (inexplicably sour) chestnut puree served on the side.

Flambée’s Dušan Jakubec is one of those chefs who tends to overburden dishes with too many elements, a problem typified by his sloppy interpretation of a classic course in French cuisine. An amuse-bouche (literally, “amuse the mouth”) is meant to be a tiny, complimentary morsel served at the beginning of a meal that prepares the palate for the larger dishes to come. Crucially, the patron should be able to eat the amuse in one or two bites. At Flambée, we were served a complicated amuse-bouche trio that was almost as large as an appetizer and took just as long to eat. There was so much going on in the amuse and in the other courses of the evening that the poor waiter almost broke into a sweat trying to explain each dish as he set it down.

As bad as Flambée is (and just to be absolutely clear, it’s very, very bad) there were still plenty of customers there on a Tuesday night – mostly foreigners, from what I could tell. I wondered if they had chosen those 390 CZK, 0.75L bottles of Scottish water of their own volition and if the waiter had offered them the less expensive Perrier as he did for us. Something told me he hadn’t.

I’m not sure why people are still visiting Flambée. Maybe the restaurant has a good PR service that does heavy promotion in guidebooks and hotels. Maybe some locals continue to think of Flambée as one of the most refined restaurants in Prague. Or maybe that 11th-century Gothic atmosphere is just too irresistible, no matter how awful the food is.

But the reasons don’t really matter. After fifteen years, Flambée should pack it in and give it up. The Czech Republic has moved on. If any of us is inclined to spend several thousand crowns on dinner, we now have access to restaurants that will really make it worth our while. And for all its flashy service and fancy-sounding foods, Flambée is definitely not one of those.

Flambée
Husova 5
Praha 1 – Old Town
map

Tel.: 224 248 512
Open Mon – Sun 11:30 – 01:00

images: flambee.cz

Read More...

Summary only...

Restaurant Review: Monarchie

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 10/05/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.

Never open a restaurant where another restaurant has failed.

It’s a rule well-known among food industry professionals the world over. Some locations, no matter how good they may seem, will inevitably sink any dining establishment that dares set up shop.

Sometimes, the reasons for the curse are obvious – there’s not enough foot traffic, or there are no other restaurants in the area to help attract customers. In other cases, the spot appears perfect, but no entrepreneur seems to be able to make it work. A restaurant with an irresistible concept or a built-in clientele will occasionally manage to turn a doomed location around (La Degustation Bohème Bourgeoise’s address, for example, is the former home of at least two other failed ventures).

Monarchie is not one of these.

When Ivan and Dagmar Havel decided to open a restaurant specializing in Austro-Hungarian cuisine, Lucerna must have been the obvious choice of locale. The celebrated pasáž is owned by Mrs. Havel, after all, and for many years after its construction was at the heart of Prague’s cultural life – an ideal place, it might seem, to recreate the pomp and splendor of an empire.

But the drab little corner of Lucerna occupied by Monarchie is anything but grand. It’s a space better-suited to a second-rate boutique or snack bar than to a restaurant with big aspirations. Even restaurants with small aspirations (most recently, the internationally-oriented eatery East West) have failed here, which might have given the would-be restaurateurs a clue.

Small restaurants can have the advantage of being cozy, but Monarchie is remarkably cold and uninviting. Its lighting (provided by those brutal energy-saving light bulbs) is far too bright; together with the wraparound windows encircling half the restaurant, it makes the diner feel a little like an exotic animal on display at the zoo. And with only one other table to attend to on a Friday evening, even the waiter seemed to regard us as a particularly delicate species of bird, a flock of rare specimens that might suddenly flutter away if he made a mistake. He was kind, but his nervousness was palpable and annoying.

A tucked-away table in a nook adjacent to the main dining area (pictured above) appeared to provide an oasis of warmth from the garishly-lit front room. But after only a few minutes in the snug little alcove, we realized just how intimate our special table was. It turned out that we were seated in the anteroom to the toilets, and were thus subjected to the comings and goings of other patrons and the various sound effects (flushing, tinkling, and, God help us, farting) that a trip to the can normally entails. We asked to switch tables, and to his credit, the waiter was very obliging.

It would have been easy to build a wall between the salonek and the toilets and to put in a separate door leading only to the bathroom area. That, however, would have called for some expenditure – and investing money to improve their patrons’ experience just isn’t Monarchie’s style. It’s more their speed to opt for benches made out of particle board and chairs upholstered in fake leather and to switch off unnecessary lights to save on electricity.

With the rest of the restaurant put together so cheaply, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Monarchie’s food isn’t of the finest quality, either. One of their most typically Austro-Hungarian dishes, the tafelspitz (Viennese-style boiled beef rump, 180 CZK) wasn’t terrible, but its dry, almost scratchy meat was far removed from the juicy, melt-in-your-mouth beef cuts you’d find at a restaurant like Plachutta in Vienna.

A roast quarter duck (260 CZK) was inexplicably served with both sweet red cabbage and sauerkraut spätzle, a combination worsened by the copious amount of cracked red pepper that had been ground over the dumplings. Nearly everything, in fact, arrived covered in the same spice, including a foie gras terrine (369 CZK) and a fillet of pikeperch (260 CZK).

The tvarohové knedlíky (cottage cheese dumplings, 80 CZK) were spared the wrath of the pepper grinder, but they were pretty unsuccessful, anyway. The fruit inside was brown and watery, probably because they’d made with frozen strawberries, and the sour bits of tvaroh grated over the top didn't appear to be the freshest, either.

Of course, when you have very few customers, it’s hard to stay on top of all the elements in a sprawling menu like this one. But there is so much about Monarchie that feels lazy and cheap that I don’t think the dismal food is an accident. This is yet another restaurant that underestimates its customers, that thinks it can squeeze by even if the quality of the food is nowhere near the splendid Austro-Hungarian cuisine it promises to deliver.

I had an inkling of just how bad my meal at Monarchie was going to be once I became aware of an alarming series of atonal noises screeching away somewhere above my head. Quasi-classical dinner music, I suppose. Couldn’t they have just played Mozart? When the violins suddenly took on a thumping techno beat as their background, it was all I could do not to stab myself in the eye with my fork.

So much for Austro-Hungary. This is one restaurant that is very firmly rooted in the Czech Republic in 2008. And even a great location couldn’t have convinced anybody otherwise.

Restaurace Monarchie
Štěpánská 61
Praha 1 - New Town
map

Tel.: +420 296 236 513
Open Mon-Fri 11.00 – 23.00

images: lucerna.cz

Read More...

Summary only...

Restaurant Review: U Lípy

Ever wonder what upscale restaurants in Prague were like, say, fifteen or twenty years ago, before there was competition from foreign chefs and sushi bars and shopping mall food courts?

You don't have to bother. Just pay a visit to U Lípy.

U Lípy (At the Linden Tree) was the first privately-owned restaurant in Communist Czechoslovakia, owing to a unique permit obtained from the government by proprietor Miroslav Růžička. When its doors first opened in early 1989, a hundred people queued outside, hoping to be allowed in.

Little has changed since, other than the number of patrons (lower) and the numbers on the menu (higher). The eclectic, pseudo-Art Nouveau decor remains untouched: dark wood antiques, family portraits, dusty fake plants, and an unconvincing mock fireplace have all found permanent homes here. "It feels like a museum," whispered one of my companions when we first sat down.

It did feel like a museum, or like an abandoned house -- cold, devoid of people, almost musty. Only the tinny sound of elevator music (at this particular moment, the Muzak version of "New York, New York") broke the eerie silence.

Until, that is, our servers came around, carrying silver appetizer platters loaded with hors d'oeuvres: half avocados stuffed with lobster mayonnaise salad (140 CZK, but made with imitation crab, not lobster), hard-boiled eggs topped with whipped butter and salmon roe and wrapped in ham (100 CZK), and thick slices of venison pâté (110 CZK). We didn't learn the prices of the starters until after we'd polished them off -- only then did we get to look at the menu.

Back in the day, there must have been more than a few people willing to pay large sums of money for the grand experience of eating dinner at U Lípy. But times have changed, and Mr. Růžička (pictured below) hasn't changed with them. By today's standards, the restaurant is overpriced, stuffy, and not very good.

Like its decor, U Lípy's table service was straight out of post-revolution Czechoslovakia. One waiter made it his mission to keep our water and wine glasses full to the brim at all times, even interrupting my friend in the middle of her sentence to ask if she wanted another Mattoni. Two servers spent most of our meal hovering within a few feet of our table, quietly discussing us. When a companion asked, a little sheepishly, if she could please have mashed potatoes with her svíčková na smetaně instead of dumplings (she had admitted to us earlier that she wasn't a dumpling fan), the waiter did his best to convince her that she couldn't possibly like the dish if she ate it with potatoes.

The food, for its part, was almost completely unmemorable. A roast goose breast (440 CZK) was offensively over salted, as was a plate of escargots Provençale (six for 130 CZK). The roast suckling pig meat (250 CZK) was fine, but the accompanying potato dumplings were dry and the steamed cabbage lacked flavor, while the beef broth with liver dumplings (50 CZK) tasted as if it had been thoroughly diluted with hot water. The wild duck breast in rosehip sauce (400 CZK) was better -- the sweet, thick rosehip purée went well with the mildly gamey duck meat and soft bread dumplings.

Really, though, the only dish worth going out to Stodůlky for are the crêpes Suzette (250 CZK), prepared table-side by Mr. Růžička himself. After drowning the thin pancakes in a sticky sauce of fresh orange and lemon juice and caramelized sugar, he lit the pan aflame with a dimming of the lights and a flourish of Cointreau. The end result was sweet, sour, and ever-so-slightly boozy. Delicious.

But was it delicious enough to make U Lípy the best restaurant in the Czech Republic? Not a chance. Yet according to the voting public that decided the rankings for Pavel Maurer's 2008 Grand Restaurant Guide, it's the number one restaurant in the country.

A couple of decades ago, the accolade might have made sense. Today, it can only reflect a certain local nostalgia for a time when dining out was predictable and uncomplicated by foreign influence, a time when a meal at a restaurant was truly special.

No one's going to deny that U Lípy is still, in its own way, very special. But after my last couple of trips to Stodůlky, I've come away feeling very grateful that we now have a few other options, too.


U Lípy
Plzeňská 237
Praha 13 - Stodůlky
Tel: +420 251 620 009
map

images: ulipy.cz

Read More...

Summary only...