This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 13/06/09 edition of Lidové Noviny.
There's only one reason to go to Café de Paris: the beef entrecôte.
The menu doesn't leave its patrons with too many other options. The choices are as follows: French onion soup, a foie gras terrine, the beef entrecôte, a vegetarian version of the beef entrecôte, and a goat cheese salad. Two appetizers, two entrees, and a salad. That's it. Pretty ballsy, if you ask me.
Well, there are the daily specials, which seem to be more of a fixed menu than they first appear. Those give you a little more breathing room, although they hardly seem necessary, given the quality of Café de Paris's star entrée.
The entrec
ôte (279 CZK) comes with a green salad, drenched in a deliciously mustard-y French vinaigrette. The salad is brought out first, and they recommend that you eat half of it immediately and the other half with your meat. Your table is then presented with two miniature grills, lit from below with candles to keep the food warm. On one goes a platter of French fries; the other is reserved for the entrecôte. Some slices of fresh baguette come with all this, too, in case the fries don't fill you up.
The beef is cooked medium rare (unless you specify otherwise) and is sliced into thin strips. You can choose whether you want it with Béarnaise sauce, red wine Parisienne sauce, or the special Café de Paris sauce, which is made according to a "secret family recipe" that has been around for seventy-five years.
My best guess is that the secret sauce contains butter, tarragon, and Dijon mustard – not entirely dissimilar to the Béarnaise, which is usually made with butter, tarragon, egg yolks, and vinegar. It is herb-laden and wonderful, a perfect accompaniment to the juicy grilled meat. On occasion, the beef can be a little chewy, but that is pretty typical of an entrecôte, which is a fattier cut of meat than some others. I would challenge anyone to show me a better example of steak frites in Prague.
Now lest you think that this whole delicious setup is a homegrown invention, I'm going to regale you with a little history (of which I myself was not aware until my faithful friend Wikipedia spelled it out for me while doing my research). The original Café de Paris is located in Geneva, where in the 1930s a certain Mr. Boubier developed a buttery sauce to accompany his restaurant's entrecôte. The sauce came to be known as "Café de Paris sauce" and the dish became the only dish on the restaurant's menu. Today, the name and the secret sauce recipe have been licensed to various restaurants around the world, one of which is the Café de Paris in Prague.
A similar concept – with a similar sauce – has been espoused by the unaffiliated L'Entrecôte chain of restaurants in France, the first of which opened in 1959 and was modeled after the original Café de Paris. Two years ago, a reporter from the magazine Le Monde claimed to have chemically analyzed L'Entrecôte's secret sauce and discovered its ingredients: a combination, he says, of fresh thyme, thyme flowers, full cream, white Dijon mustard, butter, and strained chicken livers. L'Entrecôte insists that this analysis is incorrect.
Prague's Café de Paris is understandably tight-lipped about their sauce's makeup. And even if their other dishes are less mysterious, they are often just as good. The French onion soup (45 CZK) was made from a delicate white wine broth and not broiled in a ramekin, but decorated with a single slice of crispy baguette and a modest amount of melted cheese. This made the soup much lighter and more appropriate for the summer season than the cheese-encrusted versions we are more used to seeing.
The foie gras terrine (159 CZK), too, was small but satisfying – a buttery slice of foie topped with toasted sesame seeds and surrounded by a potent sour cherry and plum coulis. Unfortunately, the special soup they had on offer, a lukewarm chicken broth "strengthened with gin" (65 CZK) and served in a martini glass with a wedge of lime, was as salty as seawater. I was also a little underwhelmed by the vegetarian version of the entrecôte platter (259 CZK), with its slightly overcooked eggplant and zucchini drenched in a goopy Béarnaise sauce. But the smoky tofu fritters that came with it were surprisingly tasty, if not quite as good as the beef my companion was tucking into.
A good part of Café de Paris's charm comes from its atmosphere – its quiet location on Maltézské náměstí, the small tables out front and in the courtyard, and the two tiny rooms decorated with red leather seats and postcards from happy customers. It's also nice to have your food served at the table by the waiters, who come around to fill up your plates with meat and French fries once you've polished off your first helping. The general feeling is of a homey little family-run place, where they don't pretend to be anything they're not.
And because this is a French restaurant, they have a thoughtful selection of wines from the home country – reasonably-priced – as well as some delicious sparkling cranberry, ginger, and elderflower lemonades (a little less reasonably-priced at 69 CZK for a small bottle).
I've written before that crème brulée is a bit of a cheap trick, but the one at Café de Paris (95 CZK) is worth ordering anyway. It was crusty on top, super-creamy below, and served with a scoop of mango ice cream and a dusting of salted cayenne pepper. It's a perfect finish to a meal at this soulful little restaurant.
Café de Paris
Maltézské náměstí 4
Praha 1 – Malá Strana
map
Tel: 603 160 718
Open Mon-Sun 12:00-24:00
photographs: 1, 4, 5, 7 Tomáš Krist for Lidové Noviny; all others cafedeparis.cz
Monday, August 3, 2009
Restaurant Review: Café de Paris
Monday, September 22, 2008
Restaurant Review: La Casa Argentina
This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 13/09/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.
During the years I've lived in Prague, a good amount of my precious time has been spent touring American visitors around the city. Those who are making their first trip outside the United States usually end up regaling me with some charmingly idiotic comments. When glimpsing Týn church or some other Gothic structure, for example, more than one has uttered something to the effect of, "Oh my God, that looks just like Disneyland!!!" Out comes the camera. Snap snap snap.
That's when I muster up as much of the patient schoolteacher in me as I can and explain that it isn't Týn that looks like Disneyland, but the other way around. 
"Can you take a picture of me in front of the castle thingy??" Never mind.
What my culturally-challenged friends are referring to is the Sleeping Beauty Castle, the pastel-colored fairy tale structure built in 1955 at the heart of the Disneyland theme park in California that has become a Disney – and, by extension, American – icon. For them, this side of the pond is like a storybook come to life, the realization of a hundred childhood fantasies of 
Smug Europeans like to snicker at this American fetishization of their culture, but it would be unfair to say that we don't have a few exotic fixations of our own. Take, for example, our capital city's current mania for all things South and Central American: La Bodeguita del Medio, a Cuban-themed bar on Kaprova, is packed nightly, a Peruvian restaurant and club just opened its doors in Old Town, and even after years as Prague's most popular cocktail, no one seems to have gotten sick of the mojito.
The simmering hub of all this Latin loving – the South American craze's local Disneyland – has to be La Casa Argentina. It's a large steak restaurant done up to be as stereotypically Argentinean as possible, with tango dancers, native fauna, and Maradona jerseys galore.
The mini-tour of Argentina starts in the Salon Caminito, a big room painted with murals meant to mimic the famous Buenos Aires neighborhood of La Boca. That's followed by the winter garden, where water trickles down a rocky wall and iguanas live in a hollowed-out fake tree trunk. The back room features a wooden bar modeled after a ship and is nicknamed "the port." Finally, there's a hallway decorated with flat screen TVs and football memorabilia and, in the basement, the Bodega Mendoza, a sort of private salon / wine cellar.
For all the investment put into La Casa Argentina's interior, the food is pretty abysmal. Most of the dishes I tried were heinously over seasoned. The cream of corn soup with shrimp (110 CZK) accomplished the impressive feat of being both bland and sickeningly salty at the same time. Ditto the goulash soup (113 CZK), which the menu claimed would be served with Argentinean beef sirloin and homemade bread, but ended up including only a smidgen of the former and none of the latter. The ground beef and chicken-chorizo empanadas (178 CZK) were inoffensive, if a bit on the chewy side, but the salad served that came with it had been salted mercilessly, too.
At least Casa Argentina manages to get the important part right: the steaks. In both quality and preparation, they are unquestionably awesome, and must be some of the best in town. Ranging in price from 335 to 1305 CZK depending on the cut of meat and its size, all of the beef is imported directly from Argentina and is cooked on an open-fire grill (or parrilla) according to your desired temperature.
My tenderloin (468 CZK for 200g) was charred on the outside and succulently red and juicy on the inside; the beef on its own is so flavorful that it really doesn't need that spoonful of herbed butter slapped on top (the waiters also push customers to order additional dipping sauces, even though all of the steaks already come with chimichurri, a traditional spicy condiment).
A restaurant that takes its beef as seriously as this one does ought to make a pretty good burger. But the one my companion tried (the "Black Ranch burger," 355 CZK) was downright bad – the meat patty wouldn't stick together and kept falling apart in big chunks, and it was completely over salted besides. Even more baffling is the fact that the kitchen doesn't cook the burger to order; when my friend asked for it done medium, the waitress responded that the patties were pre-cooked and they didn't make them on the grill. Why on earth not, especially when they have that fancy parrilla going over there in the kitchen?
The service in general was pretty lousy, with surly waiters constantly jumping into our table to grab plates and empty Mattoni bottles but disappearing when it was time to pay the bill. And prepare yourself for a long wait between courses, too.
If this whole Latin craze gets you excited, I suppose you could give La Casa Argentina a shot. For the most part, though, it's a watered-down version of the real thing, a shoddily-made fairy tale castle that relies on its exotic appeal to lure customers.
And just like in the real Disneyland, the food is bad and overpriced. Except for the steaks, of course. Those are in a category of their own – although when they're surrounded by all that phoniness, they're almost forgettable.
But not quite.
La Casa Argentina
Dlouhá 35
Praha 1
Tel: 222 311 512
Open Mon – Sun 10:00 – 02:00
images: lacasaargentina.cz
