Restaurant Review: Le Terroir

I'm being watched. Somebody is creeping up behind me, and although I can't see or hear him, my whole body has stiffened in anticipation. I try to relax – maybe I'm just being paranoid. Maybe the feeling will pass.

It doesn't. From over my left shoulder, a hand appears, brandishing a bottle of wine. My glass is filled. The hand leaves. No more than thirty seconds later, I get that same feeling again. Another hand comes into view, wearing a white glove this time, and sets down a fresh set of cutlery. A minute later, a third person is adding a splash of Vittel to our water glasses.

The next time I sense someone approaching, I turn around. It is another waiter, but he has apparently decided there isn't much left for him to do. He turns our water bottles so the labels are facing outwards, gives us a long look, and exits.

By this point, I've given up on trying to have any sort of meaningful conversation with my date; the parade of unnecessary intrusions has been going on since we first sat down. Because we would prefer not to be overheard by the wait staff, we've stopped talking whenever they've come by.

There was a time when hovering service was expected of a fancy restaurant – if you didn't have the waiter's armpit in your face for most of the evening, you weren't getting your money's worth. But times have changed, and Le Terroir doesn't seem to have gotten the memo. Have they been living in a cave for the past ten years?

Well, sort of, yes. Le Terroir is one of those below-ground restaurants with lots of bricked arches and no windows, another concept that was appealing at a certain point in history but now feels heavily outdated.

But an underground restaurant still has its cozy charms, and its advantages, too; at Le Terroir, a portion of the cellar is dedicated to its vast wine selection, and patrons can, through a glass door, glimpse the stacks of crates and bottles as they are shown to their seats. Wine is important here, as is implied by the name (there are even soil samples of various terroirs – the environment in which a wine is produced – laid into a section of the restaurant's floor). The list itself is a pretty hefty tome, with a wide spectrum of bottles ranging from the under-1000 CZK mark to a justifiably pricey 1949 Latour. For those intimidated by the amount of choice, the sommelier's selection at the front of the menu is a helpful place to start.

Considering the obvious care that has been put into the wines, it was a bit strange to be asked which bottle we wanted before we'd even had a chance to look at the dinner menu. Surely it was understood that we wanted to choose our wine according to our meal? The sommelier didn't seem to get it, though; when we said we'd like to see our food options first, he looked mildly bewildered.

As it turned out, we wouldn't just see our food options: we would hear them, too. Someone at Le Terroir has decided that it would be classy for the servers to spout off, from memory, the evening's offerings – exactly as they are written in the menu that they have just handed their guests.
This kind of thing works in a place where the waiters know the menu so well that they can rattle it off without a second's thought, and add some informative details along the way, but this was nothing short of torture. I felt like I was back in school, watching a completely unprepared student stumble her way through an oral exam. It didn't help, of course, that our poor waitress had to deliver the speech in English, blushing and stammering and awkwardly-pausing her way through a ten-course degustation menu. It was all I could do not to mouth her the answers: "scallops with… SAFFRON CONSOMME."

For all the cluelessness of the wait staff, the food mostly isn't bad. Chef Jan Punčochář prides himself on using high-quality ingredients. His concise menu changes often; the restaurant is even closed on Sundays and Mondays, when it's hard to find fresh produce. The style is French, and even if you don't order a degustation menu (ranging from 1190 CZK for three courses to 1690 CZK for six courses), you will still be pampered with various amuses-bouche between dishes.

My favorite amuse was a piece of crayfish served alongside a fennel salad and slices of orange – perfectly seasoned, simple, and light. I was less keen on the guinea fowl wrapped in bacon and topped with mashed potatoes; although it was good, it was very large, almost enough to be its own course.

My wild duck appetizer (450 CZK), too, was a hefty portion, one I could easily have handled as an entrée. But the seared pieces of duck breast were pleasantly gamey, and were well-complemented by the cubes of fresh pumpkin and spinach leaves served on the side. I quite liked my main course, too, a baked shoulder of wild pig served with chestnuts and Brussels sprouts (640 CZK).

Unfortunately, dessert – a chocolate and quark terrine with strawberry granité – was on the bland side, and my companion's fish of the day (890 CZK) was completely off. The turbot was fairly dry, and served (inexplicably) with pasta and some calamari that were well past their prime. The whole dish was so fishy, in fact, that we could smell it long before it reached our table.

We'd had about 8,000 close encounters with our waiters that evening, but at the end of the meal, there was no one to bring us our check. By the time we left, I was so exhausted that I couldn't even make a snide remark to my friend about the 265 CZK water bottle that appeared on the bill, or the fact that our coats hadn't been hung up on hangers even though there were plenty of empty ones to use. "Let's just get out of here," I said.

So we did.

Le Terroir
Vejvodova 1
Praha 1
map
Tel.: 222 220 260
Open Tues-Sat 11:00-23:00

photographs 2, 3, 5, 6 Ondřej Němec for Lidové Noviny; all others leterroir.cz

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 12/19/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.

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Restaurant Review: Lancia Café

Here's a riddle for you. It's lunchtime and you're hungry. Because you have a pretty distinguished palate, you don't want to eat just anything. It has to be decent. Up to international standards, even.

But there's a catch: you're in Bratislava. Besides hopping in the car and driving the 60 kilometers to Vienna, what can you possibly do?

You see, there isn't much going on in Slovakia's capital in terms of restaurants. They exist, but most of them are pretty pathetic, and not even very cheap. The situation is bad enough to make wishy-washy Prague look like a culinary Mecca. As a Czech businessman I once overheard on the Pendolino to Bratislava said (with admirable succinctness), "It's a hole. There's nothing there."

My parents would argue otherwise. They are Slovak and spend a lot of time in their homeland, testing out various second-rate eateries in the hope that they will find someplace worth revisiting. And after a while, they did find a place – three places, in fact.

It just so happens that all three of those restaurants are in the same building (the Erdödy Palác), owned by the same company, and presided over by a single chef. And it also happens that that chef is Czech. His name is Jaroslav Židek, and the restaurants are called Camouflage, Flowers, and Lancia Café.

I've been to all three establishments multiple times. Camouflage is the most expensive, with fancy French-inspired cuisine; I liked the food, but found it to be a little complicated for my taste – I vaguely recall a chocolate fondant that came with about ten different accessories. Flowers has upscale Italian food that is very tasty (try the saffron, shrimp, and asparagus risotto), but its best asset is its atmosphere: situated in an airy, glassed-over courtyard, its walls are plastered all the way up to the ceiling with original prints of Andy Warhol's "Flowers" series.

So why did I choose to write about Lancia Café, which is the least fancy of the three and a bit more of a bar and café than a real restaurant? I'm going to blame this one on my mom and dad, who are regulars there, and who swore up and down that I was going to absolutely love it. "Best restaurant in Bratislava," they insisted. "And there's nothing like it in Prague." Well, that was true at least. I can't think of a Prague restaurant that serves both crêpes and yaki soba noodles – a combination that I didn't necessarily find appealing, but I was going to try the place anyway.

When I visited, it was still warm enough to sit outside on Lancia Café's wood-plank terrace. The setup is great for checking out the hordes of people as they stroll up and down Bratislava's main pedestrian thoroughfare. The café is less appealing on the inside, where stark lighting, flat-screen TVs and black plastic chairs make the place feel vaguely futuristic and very cold.

The menu consists of a few Asian-inspired bar snacks and entrees, some soups and sandwiches, and the aforementioned crêpes and their savory buckwheat flour counterpart, the galette. My galette came with shrimp, hard-boiled eggs, leek, and crème fraiche (€8.80). It was also cold.

Maybe it was because I was sitting outside, but by the time it got to me, my galette was no longer fresh off the pan. It was the same story on a subsequent visit, when my companion ordered the spinach and mushroom galette (€8.13). It probably would have helped if the plates had been heated. Otherwise, the galettes were all right, but the dough was a little bland, as if it needed to be salted more. These were far inferior – and a lot more expensive – to the galettes at La Crêperie in Holešovice. So far, I was unimpressed.

I was happier with the tom yum gai soup (€3.82), which was both warm enough and had a sweet-spicy kick. Still, my mother claimed she'd had better versions of the soup there before, and after some thought, she admitted that the food was often inconsistent. Depending on who was cooking that night, it seemed, the dishes were always a little different.

If that is indeed the case, I hope the chicken with green curry (€12.12) is usually better. When I had it, it was incredibly greasy, with oil gathered in pools at the top, and tasted only of chili and nothing more. The chicken was tough and stringy, a surprise after the tender chicken sate appetizer (€7.47) I'd just had. Plus, we had to wait an absurdly long time for our main courses to arrive.

It's not all bad at Lancia Café. They have a fantastic salad comprised of papaya, celery root, green beans, and grilled shrimp in a spicy lime dressing (€10.79), and a simple but tasty chicken stir-fry (€13.11). And their desserts can be pretty great, too: the Thai classic sticky rice with mango, honey, and coconut milk (€5.48) and a range of homemade ice creams and sorbets (the chocolate sorbet is particularly wonderful). They also are the only restaurant in Slovakia to brew the top-quality "sustainable" coffee Tierra Lavazza, a blend harvested exclusively from three small communities in Colombia, Peru, and Honduras.

Was all this good enough to make me a believer? I will probably visit Lancia Café again the next time I'm in Bratislava. But I’m still not sure it could live up to the standards of a more cosmopolitan city and a more demanding clientele. Looks like all that time in the home country has made my parents soft. Nice try, guys, but next time you'll have to come up with something better.

Lancia Café
Ventúrska 1 - Erdödyho Palác
Bratislava, Slovakia
Tel.: +421 2 209 227 22

Open Mon-Sun 08:00-01:00

photographs 1, 3, 5, 6 Tomáš Hájek for Lidové Noviny; all others lanciacafe.sk

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 31/10/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.

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Restaurant Review: Kampa Park

Kampa Park's best asset is still its location. Positioned atop the Vltava in the shadow of the Charles Bridge, with sweeping views across Old Town and just a short distance from Malá Strana's storybook streets, it is hard to imagine a more attractive locale for a Prague restaurant.

But everybody knows that already – especially the hordes of tourists death-marching across the Bridge who spot Kampa Park's shiny terraces and decide to head on down for a classy meal. In recent years, in fact, the name Kampa Park has become so affiliated with its tourist clientele that few locals even consider it as a dining option. No one, it seems, plans a big dinner out at Kampa.

It wasn't always that way. When it first opened, and for quite a few years afterward, Kampa Park was the fancy restaurant; foreign movie stars who rolled through town always seemed to make pit stops there. A wall of faded celebrity photographs, taken with Kampa's owners, reads like a scrapbook of 1990s action heroes: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Clinton.

Kampa Park was the brainchild of partners Nils Jebens and Tommy Sjöö, who used to be the city's reigning restaurateurs. Their seemingly indomitable rule began in the early '90s, when Sjöö owned a restaurant in Obecní Dům called Brasserie Mozart (now the location of Francouzská Restaurace). Brasserie Mozart was among the first places in Prague to have a salad bar – a revolutionary concept, apparently, and enough to convince Jebens to partner up with Sjöö to open Kampa Park and the now-defunct Italian restaurant Segafredo on Na Příkopě.

Kampa Group, as the company was called, cycled through various ventures, some more successful than others. Eventually, the company split into competing fiefdoms: Pravda Group, lorded over by Sjöö and encompassing the Old Town restaurants Pravda, Barock, and (while they lasted) Aqua and Hot. Jebens, meanwhile, ruled the Malá Strana side of the river, developing Hergetová Cihelna, Cowboys, and Square (now replaced by Starbucks).

Jebens's flagship restaurant, of course, is still Kampa Park, even if it lacks the luster it had ten or fifteen years ago. The cuisine is in the French style, influenced slightly by Scandinavia and Asia, and sometimes by cliché – one of the starters is a beef carpaccio with arugula, Parmesan, and olive oil (395 CZK), the same dish you'd find in a Modrá Zahrada pizzeria, or almost anywhere nowadays.

But Kampa can also be pleasantly surprising, as in the case of their scallop appetizer. For two small scallops, 545 CZK is a bit on the steep side, but this dish was unique: the mollusks perfectly seared, served in a buttery lemon dill sauce with tiny niblets of cauliflower. Norwegian flavors, French technique.

The same description could apply to my king crab salad (645 CZK), a flavorful mayonnaise-based treat of fresh crab, chopped chives, and a mysterious spice I had trouble identifying. It was served atop a slick of tomato jelly (which was good but tasted a little like canned tomato paste) next to a small frisee salad with sprouts; some crispy fried bread sticks; and a little bit of salmon roe. The presence of dill was palpable here, too, which I appreciated – dill is common in Northern and Slavic cuisines, but I wish we could see more of it in French and Mediterranean cooking.

I had been skeptical of the place before I'd revisited it, but by the time the appetizers had been cleared away, I was beginning to think I'd judged Kampa Park all wrong. Maybe this was still one of the top few restaurants in Prague. Maybe, for all these years, miracles had been happening in its kitchen, and we'd all been too blinded by the flashy new establishments to notice.

Even the service, you see, had been exceptional up until that point. Our waitress had this amazing knack for glancing over at our table every time she walked by (something that should be second nature to every waiter, but I've found that most of them actually like to turn their heads away from your table when they approach, so as to avoid accidental eye contact with their customers). She never took away any plates before we were all finished, and she didn't pour water mercilessly into our cups. It seemed to me, as a matter of fact, that she had actually been trained.

So I was disappointed when the wait between our first two courses stretched into uncomfortable-silence territory. You know what I'm talking about – when you get so preoccupied with where your entrée might be that instead of talking to your dining companion, you repeatedly check your watch and look towards the kitchen doors. Our waitress, angel that she was, came to apologize. It was the soufflé, she said, that was taking so long.

I wish it had been worth the wait. Unfortunately, it was cheese overkill – cheesy black truffle soufflé (495 CZK) in a cheesy white sauce with cheesy parmesan chips, and the whole thing was very salty. I was happier with my lamb entrée (895 CZK); the meat was super tender and I liked the baby vegetables and sweet pea puree on the side, but the red wine sauce was one-dimensional and the little bits of sweetbread seemed more like an afterthought than an integrated part of the dish. Dessert, on the other hand, a strawberry cappuccino (295 CZK), served in a glass with meringue, vanilla ice cream, strawberry coulis and an edible forest berries skewer, was summery and divine.

So would I recommend Kampa Park now? Yes, with some hesitation. The outdoor seating is wonderful, the service is wonderful, the food is occasionally wonderful. You could definitely find better value for money; the water – some absurd Norwegian brand – costs 165 CZK for a 0.8l bottle. But keep Kampa in mind next time you’re in the mood to pay for a fancy dinner. You could do a whole lot worse.

Kampa Park
Na Kampě 8b
Praha 1 - Malá Strana
Tel.: 296 826 112

photographs 2, 4, 6 Jindřich Mynařík for Lidové noviny; all others kampagroup.com

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 19/09/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.

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Restaurant Review: Olympos

I don't know what it is about me and Greek places. On my last visit to a Greek joint (Kri-Kri, on Korunní), I was not only subjected to painfully slow service, but was told that I should expect it to be slow, because that's how things happen in Greece.

Now here I am, sitting at Taverna Olympos, and after waiting ages for a server to take our orders, I have spotted him making his way over to a table of about eight people to take their orders – before ours have been put in to the kitchen. Of course, the big table came after we did, and of course they will get their food first. And naturally, I am starving. I've unwittingly cast myself in One Greek Minute: The Sequel.

When our appetizers finally arrive, they come with a mixed salad we didn't order and one of our main courses. The other entrée comes way later, and it isn't what we wanted. Confusingly, the menu offers two codfish dishes, one fresh and priced by weight, and the other, described only as a "fillet," for 180 CZK. We didn't realize there were two options and weren't asked which of them we wanted, so we ended up with the battered and deep fried fillet.

Olympos has been around since 1997 – first as Tavernaki Olympos, a tiny operation in Pohořelec, then as a thirteen-table restaurant at their current location in Žižkov. They've since expanded to 103 tables, many of which are pleasantly situated in a large outdoor garden. In summertime, the outdoor seating is definitely the main draw, with its leafy trees, children's playground and kitschy murals depicting beach scenes and the Acropolis. So it's a bit of a shame that (although it is de rigeur in Greece to start dinner as late as 21:30) by 22:00, Olympos's guests have to be shuffled indoors or to the winter garden to satisfy noise restrictions. Better, then, to come a little early so you can enjoy the garden for longer.

For some reason, I'd been under the impression that Olympos is an inexpensive restaurant. It can be, I guess, but it depends on what you order. The main courses range from 160 to 800 CZK (for a two-person shrimp tagliatelle), and smaller dishes cost between 70 and 280 CZK. Not a crazy amount, but I didn't necessarily find the value to be all that good. On my second visit, I had the shrimp saganaki. For a fairly hefty 400 CZK, I got a ceramic bowlful (250 grams) of very small, overcooked shrimp, in an admittedly tasty feta, tomato, and green pepper sauce. But I liked Kri-Kri's shrimp saganaki a lot better, and that one cost only 105 CZK for 150 grams. And the Taverna salad (240 CZK) seemed pretty pricey too, considering it was nothing more than a plate of soggy lettuce with a couple of olives and sun-dried tomatoes.

As often seems to be the case in Greek restaurants (and, for that matter, in restaurants in general), the appetizers far outshone the main courses. The tyropites (125 CZK), or cheese-filled pastries, were hot and crispy and oozing with melted salty cheese. The dough was different than the filo dough I'm used to seeing these made with – it was thicker and more brittle, like a spring roll – but they were delicious, and there were lots of them. The peppers stuffed with cheese (120 CZK), on the other hand, only came with two small peppers floating in olive oil, but they had a nice spicy kick. I could have done with more bite in the tzatziki (95 CZK), which seemed a little low on garlic.

For a general taste of the starters, I would recommend you try the Olympos salad (280 CZK). Because it has no explanation in the menu, and the waiter wasn't able to describe it either, I'm going to tell you what was in it: hummus, eggplant spread, potato salad, tzatziki, htipiti (feta cheese spread), gigante beans in tomato sauce, and marinated bell peppers. Not a bad selection. I wanted to get the dolmades as a starter, but they were only listed as a 350g main course. The waiter was flexible enough to give us a half portion; unfortunately, although they came served in a very tasty tomato sauce, they were a little on the bland side.

Best of all was the grilled haloumi (165 CZK), a rubbery Greek cheese that squeaks when you chew it. The thick slices were covered in grill marks, which added a nice smokiness – yum. But it was all downhill from there. The papoutsaki (265 CZK), or stuffed eggplant ("papoutsa" means shoe in Greek), was flavorless and didn't have much meat. The sutzukaki smirneika (ground meat sausages, 225 CZK) were better, but were surrounded by a very oily, thin tomato sauce. And the side dish of grilled vegetables (at an unjustifiable 185 CZK) was an unattractive, woefully greasy mess of random veggies.

Here's what you should do: go to Olympos with some friends, sit in the garden, watch the neighborhood cats tormenting the patrons' tied-up dogs. Let your kids play on the swings and slide. Order a whole bunch of starters to share, as if you were in a tapas joint, and fill up on those. Get some wine, which they serve in these cute colored aluminum carafes, and be careful with the water – in large bottles, they only seem to have some Greek brand that goes for 100 CZK apiece. Skip the main courses. Enjoy, pay, leave.

There you go – a simple, inexpensive meal in a nice Greek restaurant. And you say I never recommend anything…

Taverna Olympos
Kubelíkova 9
Praha 3 – Žižkov
Tel.: 222 722 239
Open Mon-Sun 11:30-24:00

photographs 1, 4, 6 František Vlček for Lidové Noviny; all others taverna-olympos.eu

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 29/08/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.

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Restaurant Review: Mirellie

It's not hard to see why the most-asked question about Mirellie is whether or not it's affiliated with the popular restaurant chain Kogo. All you have to do is open their menu.

Anyone familiar with Kogo's offerings will experience a little déjà vu at Mirellie. The divisions between dishes are the same and in the same order – starters, fish starters, soups, pastas, risottos, etc. – and many of the dishes themselves are word-for-word copies. Plus, just like at Kogo, the selection is enormous.

The difference is in the prices. At Kogo Slovanský Dům, the grilled roast beef with arugula and parmesan cheese goes for 310 CZK. The same dish at Mirellie costs 135 CZK. At Kogo, a simple plate of linguine with olive oil, garlic and shrimps will set you back 295 CZK. Mirellie charges 165 CZK. A fish soup at Kogo? 210 CZK. Mirellie's is priced at 90 CZK.

No, Mirellie is not affiliated with Kogo. At least some of its owners, however, are former Kogo employees, and it seems they've decided to beat their fellow countrymen-restaurateurs at their own game (both Kogo's and Mirellie's proprietors are from the former Yugoslavia): serving a large range of Mediterranean classics in a modestly upscale atmosphere.

Mirellie's location on a quiet Bubeneč street used to be home to the Asian fusion restaurant Monsoon, and not much has changed in terms of the décor. The dining area is separated into upstairs and downstairs sections, the walls and furniture various shades of brown, grey and beige. The upper space has a bar, a couple of leather couches, and a flat-screen TV; the tables down below are adjacent to the kitchen and toilets. Unfortunately, the non-smoking section is in the far less pleasant downstairs area – a decision that makes sense in terms of its proximity to the kitchen, but continues the city's depressing trend of giving priority to smokers.

Since it opened at the beginning of this year, Mirellie has gained quite a few regular customers. Some of them might be neighborhood diners looking for a decent place to eat – Bubeneč and Dejvice are still low on quality restaurants, and one of the few comparable upper-scale Italian options, Da Emanuel, is very much on the expensive side. Other patrons are former fans of Kogo who have become disillusioned with its constant price hikes and are willing to travel out of the center to get their Yugo-pasta fix.

I count myself as one of the latter. I don't want to mislead anybody; I'm still a big fan of Kogo's, and for years, their restaurants have been some of the most consistently high-quality spots in town. But Kogo is now the kind of place I can't eat in very often without feeling guilty about the money I'm spending.

So on my first visit to Mirellie, naturally, I ordered my favorite Kogo dish: the tagliatelle with arugula and shrimp. At Kogo, this would have set me back 285 CZK; here, it was a mere 170 CZK. But the Mirellie version wasn't as good as Kogo's. The pasta seemed a little dry, as if there wasn't enough sauce or the sauce wasn't especially flavorful. The shrimp, however, were plentiful and perfectly cooked (on a recent Kogo Slovanský Dům visit, the shrimp had been way too soft), as was the pasta, so I was pretty happy overall.

And there were some real delights: a huge portion of bean soup (60 CZK), loaded with the musky aroma of smoked bacon; a small grilled sea bass (290 CZK), so fresh it still tasted of the ocean, served whole but deboned. One of the weekly specials, a lobster salad (260 CZK), could only be described as a fabulous deal. Almost anywhere else, you don't even get to smell a lobster for under 300 CZK. Here, there was a solid half-lobster, several shrimp, and a generous amount of garden salad in a creamy, Russian-style dressing (I didn't get to taste another intriguing special, the polenta with porcini mushrooms, because it wasn't available on either of my visits).

It's certainly not the quantity of food that Mirellie's saving its money on; my pizza Vegetariana (129 CZK) was so big it spilled over the edges of a large dinner plate. It had a thin, cripsy crust and was topped with marinated bell peppers, (undercooked) eggplant, zucchini, mushrooms, and kalamata olives. I got half of it wrapped up to go. The grilled octopus with beans and leek (160 CZK) was another large dish, even for an appetizer, with lots of gently browned octopus. I suspected the beans had come out of the can, but they still tasted good. When you've got over two hundred dishes on the menu, I guess you have to cut corners somewhere.

I didn't have any dessert on either of my visits – I was too full, and besides, the dessert options seemed to be limited to the frozen Bindi cakes and profiteroles that so many other restaurants and cafés carry.

The service at Mirellie can be a little slow and forgetful sometimes (on one evening, two of us never got any napkins), and, at other times, a little too eager to clean up plates and pour out Mattoni bottles. I also didn't like that we were charged for bread (10 CZK each for a pizza dough-type roll) even if we didn't eat it. Were we expected to take it home?

Mirellie is destined to be compared to Kogo. People like me will come in and order their usual Kogo dish and will end up either disappointed or pleasantly surprised. But for all the similarities between the two restaurants, the newer one really is doing its own thing, and doing it well. Soon enough, perhaps, guests won't even think to ask about the connection. They'll just appreciate Mirellie for what it is.

Mirellie
V.P. Čkalova 14
Praha 6 – Bubeneč
Tel.: 222 959 999

Open Mon-Sun 11:00-23:00

photographs 1, 2, 4, 5, 6 Tomáš Krist for Lidové noviny; all others mirellie.cz

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 22/08/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.

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Restaurant Review: Pálffy Palác

When Pálffy Palác was in its heyday, in the mid-90s, they used to serve whole roasted heads of garlic at the beginning of each meal. You'd pop a hot clove out of its shell and smear it on a crusty piece of bread, over a thick layer of butter. The garlic would dissolve into a soft puree at the gentlest touch of a knife.

I was only a kid when my family started going to Pálffy for dinner, but for some reason, the memory of the roasted garlic has stuck with me ever since. So upon returning to Pálffy Palác after what was perhaps a ten-year-long interlude, I was excited to see the waiter carrying the familiar plate of roasted garlic heads and slabs of butter over to our table.

But when I tried to spread the clove across the bread with my butter knife, it didn't melt the way I'd remembered. And it didn't taste very good, either. What had gone wrong?

Pálffy Palác used to be a very sought-after place to go. Housed on the second floor of a 17th-century baroque palace in Malá Strana, it felt almost like a secret restaurant set up in somebody's grand, slightly run-down living room. For a long time, it was the only restaurant in town to serve fresh spinach. It was good and inexpensive, frequented mostly by expats and the likes of Karel Gott (a distinction that apparently elevates any old dive to must-visit status).

Then Prague became flooded with similarly-oriented restaurants, and although few of them had the natural charm of Pálffy, many served fresh spinach and were a lot easier to stumble across. Pálffy bumped up its prices significantly, too, making itself more of a high-end, special-occasion restaurant than an everyday stopover. And perhaps its owner, Roman Řezníček, was momentarily distracted by the opening up of his Holešovice dance club Mecca (since sold to new owners; Řezníček has now also owns longstanding local restaurant U Malířů). Pálffy Palác pretty much fell off the map.

That at least partially explains the stale garlic: a low turnover makes it hard to get the stuff piping hot from the oven for every customer. Nonetheless, Pálffy has a new chef, French-born Kevin Donneger, and it seems to be aiming for a comeback.

The restaurant is still stunning – even, in some aspects, better-looking than it used to be. Pálffy Palác's terrace is one of the most beautiful in the city, overlooking the castle gardens and now, having had some time to grow, lush with plant life. The tops of a set of vanilla trees have risen to eye level, their brown pods swinging in the breeze, while the terrace itself is covered in mismatched ivies and flowers, lending it the atmosphere of a wild garden.

Indoors, the small dining room is all antique furniture, elaborate candelabras, and pretty floral and fruit arrangements. It feels like just the right kind of place to warm up on a wintry evening with a glass of red wine and a newfound lover.

But that may be as far as you should take it. Pálffy is, for what it is, overpriced; main courses cost between 490 and 690 CZK, and I never quite felt I was getting my money's worth. The ravioli filled with goat's cheese and served with bacon cream (290 CZK) were not great: they reminded me of my grandmother's pirogies, only a lot worse, because the ravioli was undercooked and beyond al dente, leading me to suspect that the pasta wasn't especially fresh. I had been intrigued by the notion of "bacon cream," but it ended up being nothing more than regular cream sprinkled with bits of fatty bacon.

And although Mr. Donneger has professed his passion for using organic ingredients, he doesn't seem to put much stock into the seasonality of his menu. One of the two entrée options for lunch on a sweltering summer day was a venison steak in an oily brown gravy. The meat came with two little piles of green and yellow zucchini, but they tasted as if they had been doused in butter. My appetizer wasn't very summery, either: a clichéd combination of baked goat cheese on white toast over a pear compote, drizzled with balsamic reduction. I'm getting sweaty just thinking about it.

The glowing exception to all this nonsense was the perfect green bean soup (135 CZK), a snappy-tasting light cream that brought out all the flavor of its simple main ingredient. I also liked the rosemary crème brulee (250 CZK) that I had for dessert, although the vanilla millefeuille with red fruit coulis (290 CZK) was so frugal on the berries you almost had to squint to make out the little dots of sauce on the plate. For good measure, I guess, they also tossed in half a strawberry.

I was a little turned off when, on my way to the bathroom inside, I overheard the trio of waiters laughing loudly about the American family sitting on the terrace. Instead of exchanging ty voles, maybe they could have studied the menu. My companion ordered the seasonal sorbet selection (190 CZK), and the waiter wasn't able to tell him what flavors they had, even though the only ones available were strawberry and lemon.

It would be unfair to say that the service at Pálffy is bad; it was always friendly, to our faces, anyway. But we went through a whole meal without being given a napkin, and the weekday set lunch took almost two hours.

That probably doesn't sound too attractive to those of you who are in the market for a quick business lunch. If your inclinations are a little more romantic, however, Pálffy is a pretty good place for that kind of thing. Just don't set your expectations too high.

Pálffy Palác
Valdštejnská 14
Praha 1 - Malá Strana
map
Tel.: 257 530 522

Open Mon-Sun 11:00-23:00

photographs 1, 5, 6 Pavel Wellner for Lidové Noviny; all others palffypalac.cz

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 08/08/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.

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