Restaurant Review: John & George

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 24/05/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.

This week, I intended to write about a different restaurant, a small French bistro in Prague 2, but an incident happened there that forced me to reconsider. The sauce that came with my main course – a roast chicken with couscous and oriental spices – was bitter and foul-tasting; it had obviously gone bad.
When I informed the waiter of this fact, he took my plate away without a word and brought it to the kitchen. Twenty minutes later, he brought back the very same plate with the same chicken (now cold) that I’d already taken a bite from. The sauce was the same, too (I could tell because it now had bits of couscous in it from when they’d scraped it off the plate), only it had been covered in a sickening amount of black pepper and random spices.

“I’m sorry you didn’t like your sauce,” the waiter smirked. I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t simply that I didn’t like the sauce. It was rotten. It shouldn’t have been served. He didn’t care.

So I decided not to give that restaurant any advertisement at all. Few people have heard of it, and I’d like it to stay that way. Instead, I decided to recommend a little-known place that deserves the attention.

John & George has a gorgeous garden for outdoor seating. They also have a nice interior space. But not, apparently, at the same time.

On a recent sunny day, I arrived at the Malá Strana café hoping to sit outside, but the garden was closed. A couple of weeks later, when I wanted to dine inside, the waitress informed me that “we’re sitting outside today.”

Still, she allowed me to remain indoors, albeit with a warning that she wouldn’t have much time for me. The service ended up being perfect anyway, without even a single moment spent wondering where the hell the waitress was.

If the service at John & George is occasionally a little slow, it’s not for lack of trying on the part of the staff. They move quickly, behave politely, and – steady yourselves, now – even smile at their patrons. But after a lackluster start, this little-known café has found itself a firm following, and the people working there are racing to catch up.

John & George is at its most attractive in the spring and summer, when the outdoor seating allows guests to gaze upon the Velkopřevorský palác’s garden, tucked away behind the gaggles of picture-snapping visitors making peace signs in front of the John Lennon wall.

A few tourists do occasionally make their way into the secret garden, but the crowd is generally an interesting mix of Czechs and local foreigners, including some from the French embassy located across the square. Despite its location just steps away from some of the most heavily-touristed streets in Prague, you won’t find any rowdy tour groups here – the blossoming flowers, well-manicured lawn, and ancient plane tree make the outdoor area so peaceful that few visitors dare raise their voices.

Which is all the better, I suppose, for enjoying John & George’s clean, straightforward brand of (mostly) lunch fare. The food is consistent and reasonably priced – the most expensive dish, a salmon steak served with basmati rice and creamed spinach, costs just 165 CZK.
The portion of fish wasn’t especially large, but the salmon was perfectly flaky, lightly seared, and well-seasoned. Its accompanying sauce, a lemony cream vaguely reminiscent of svíčková na smetaně, was so good that I couldn’t help but lap it all up with the help of the spinach and rice.
I loved John & George’s carrot soup (60 CZK), too, which comes laced with coconut milk and fresh cilantro, as well as their fluffy quiche lorraine (98 CZK), made with leeks and real smoked ham. Basically (and unlike almost every other casual lunch place in Prague), this kitchen knows how to cook.

So I’m willing to forgive them a few mistakes: the stale bread, for example, or a plate of crêpes Suzette (90 CZK) that didn’t seem to have been flambéed as is required by the traditional recipe. They do have an excellent homemade carrot cake (65 CZK), its moist dough dense with raisins and filled with a thick layer of tangy cream cheese, and a tasty raspberry meringue dessert (90 CZK).

If you do choose (or are instructed) to sit indoors, you’ll be able to admire the original Romanesque walls – the foundational structures in the café are actually the only part of the Velkopřevorský palác to preserve its original 12th-century architecture. It wasn’t built to be a restaurant, obviously; the indoor area is divided into three smallish rooms, and the toilets are rather awkwardly situated in a courtyard outdoors, but the eccentricities of the layout are kind of charming.

Unfortunately, the lack of natural light and grayish walls can make the space feel a little gloomy at times, though they do their best to brighten it up with mosaic table lamps and colorful pillows decorating the simple wooden furniture. The tasteful décor is a little marred by some ugly contraptions made of straw and fake grass, though I’m hoping that these are just Easter decorations somebody forgot to put away and not a permanent addition to the ambience.

There’s a similar blemish in the garden area, too, in the form of large parasols bearing the Coca-cola logo. The parasols are a good idea, but the huge corporate logos look glaringly out-of-place next to the beautiful palace and its serene lawn.

But that, of course, is a small criticism. The fact is that there really aren’t too many complaints to make about John & George. I’m pretty sure they’d never serve me a rotten sauce twice – or even once, for that matter. It’s just not that kind of place.


John and George Café / Restaurant
Velkopřevorské nám. 4
Praha 1 - Malá Strana
map

Tel.: 257 217 736
Open: Mon-Sun 11.00 - 22.00

images: johngeorge.cz, Prague Spoon

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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

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Restaurant Review: Café Savoy

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

Café Savoy takes its tatarák very seriously.

I discovered this when I was unable to finish my portion of Savoy’s delicate beef tartare (198 CZK) at the end of an especially filling lunch. Even after all the other dishes had been cleared and I’d started on my cake and coffee, the staff still wouldn’t take away my leftover dollop of steak paste.
I didn’t much feel like looking at a pile of greasy topinky while I ate my dessert, so I asked a waiter to remove the offending plate. He lumbered over reluctantly.

"Well, if you ask me to take away your plate, I can." He paused.

"Yes, I would like you to take away my plate, please," I repeated.

"Was there something wrong with it?" He hadn’t yet picked up the dish.

"No," I said. "I’m just full."

Finally, he very slowly reached for the plate and carried it out of my sight. He definitely wasn’t happy about it, though.

Look, I know that in this country it’s considered sacrilege to leave a perfectly good piece of meat – let alone svíčková (beef tenderloin) – unfinished. But I eat out a lot, and if I were to finish every buttery morsel of every dish I ordered, they’d have to start rolling me into the restaurants I review.

And that wouldn’t be very discreet, would it?

The truth is that the tatarák at Savoy is excellent. So maybe the old guy just couldn’t understand why somebody would be unwilling to scarf it all down. But if I don’t want to finish my food, he has no business asking me why not, and he certainly shouldn’t be trying to make me feel bad about it.

Occasional lapses in service are Café Savoy’s only drawback. It’s a weakness that I find frustrating because I actually love Savoy to bits – and as regular readers might already have noticed, I don’t fall in love with restaurants too easily.

Café Savoy, with its huge windows and gorgeous, government-protected Neo-Renaissance plaster-cast ceiling, is an instantly impressive kind of place. On one side of the restaurant is an elevated seating area for smokers; the walls of the room around the corner are covered with wooden shelves stacked with bottles of wine and lit so that the bottles give off a warm glow. Savoy’s atmosphere is certainly hard to beat.

This unique space wasn’t always as pretty as its current incarnation. After it first opened in 1893, Café Savoy became a favorite haunt of local intellectuals (including Franz Kafka, who attended some Yiddish theatre performances held there). But when the property changed hands during World War I, the famous ceiling was boarded up and the café was transformed into small boutiques. The original plasterwork remained preserved under the suspended ceiling for the duration of the Communist era, during which the space was used as a police recruitment center. Post-revolution, Savoy re-emerged as a dingy, smoke-filled café.

In 2004, Ambiente Group took Savoy over and set about restoring its former glory. It is now one of the few restaurants in Prague that serves traditional Czech dishes made from high-quality ingredients. They’re not interested in cheating their customers here, and it shows. All of their meats are fantastic: the Prague ham, the frankfurters served with mustard and fresh horseradish, the aforementioned tatarák.

They win points for presentation, too. Order a cup of the delicious Savoy hot chocolate (55 CZK) and they’ll bring it to you in a little pitcher, and waiters pour the hearty soups (called "Restaurants" here, for reasons explained on the menu) into their bowls right at your table. The old-school details feel elegant and practical – not pretentious, as they might in a stuffier setting.

There’s one thing about Savoy that baffles me a little: it has two different menus. One is their regular menu; the other is something called the "Gourmet Menu." The Gourmet Menu offers fancier, more expensive versions of some of the items on the regular menu, along with some French-inspired extras. If you order food off the Gourmet Menu, you get to eat on a white damask tablecloth. If you don’t order off the Gourmet Menu, you eat on a bare table.

What is the point of this bizarre distinction? If I order the regular steak tartare instead of the Parisian steak tartare, am I unworthy of a tablecloth? And why does the whole restaurant have to know that I ordered from the less expensive menu? They should integrate the two – it’s perfectly fine to have varying price categories on the same menu, and it would create less confusion for first-time visitors.

That’s not to say that the Gourmet Menu items aren’t any good. I had an excellent svíčková na smetaně (beef in cream sauce made with real tenderloin; the version on the regular menu isn’t) that came with a saucière of extra sauce – an incredibly thoughtful touch. I can also recommend the homemade fruit dumplings (154 CZK). When I tried them, they were filled with fresh strawberries and served with do-it-yourself chocolate sauce, strawberry yoghurt, and breadcrumbs. And if you're feeling especially hungry one morning, be sure to check out their elaborate French, English, and American breakfasts.

I occasionally like to have lunch at Café Savoy by myself. There used to be a maître d' there who thought it was very charming to ask me personal questions about my life and to tell me what kind of mood he supposed I was in based on how much make-up I happened to be wearing that day. Why do so many waiters seem to think that a woman eating lunch and reading a book by herself needs to be talked to? Just get over it, please, guys. And while you're at it, bring me that matonka I ordered a half-hour ago. Thanks.

It seems that this man no longer works at Savoy, and I have to say that as annoyingly invasive as he was, I kind of miss him. But that's only because the service seemed to be much better when he was around. Some longtime Café Savoy regulars, including myself, have observed a lot of scowling, snappy, and impossible-to-flag-down waiters there recently.

They'd better manage to work the service problems out soon – in every other respect, Café Savoy is one of the best and most dependable restaurants in Prague. Unless something drastically bad happens, I'll still be a regular there. It's just too loveable for me to let it go.

Café Savoy
Vítězná 5, 150 00 Praha 5
map
Tel.: +420 257 311 562
Open Mon-Fri 8:00 – 22:30, Sat-Sun 09:00 – 22:30

images: praguespoon.com / ambi.cz

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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

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Restaurant Review: U Kastelána

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 03/05/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.

In U Kastelána’s early days, Prague-based businessmen would hop in their cars and drive the 200 km to Brno for lunch. After their bellies were filled up with sweetbread and fried pigs’ ears, they’d turn around and drive right back.

There just wasn’t anything quite like it in the capital city.

The golden age of U Kastelána is surely over. In the past few years, Prague has become home to a bevvy of foreign chefs, a lot of well-hyped restaurants, and a hard-won Michelin star. But the Brno high-end standby still boasts a strong regular clientele, including a few die-hard fans who are willing to go well out of their way to make a visit.

When U Kastelána was opened by proprietors Mr. and Mrs. Lembart in 1991, it was nothing more than a snack bar near Brno’s main train station. But word of their unusual delicacies and accomodating service spread fast, and by 2000, they had decided to transfer their booming business to a larger space.

The restaurant no longer has to worry about where to squeeze in tables; the newer incarnation of U Kastelána almost seems to have more room than it knows what to do with. Its home is now the cavernous fermenting cellar of a former brewery, where stone columns, brick archways, and a long dining room create an imposing first impression. Leather-upholstered chairs carved out of dark wood add to the mildly stiff atmosphere, and the tables are covered with kitschy flower-patterned runners, but the overall effect is still quite grand.

I wish the same could be said for building’s exterior. On first glance, it’s hard to believe that one of the most lauded Czech restaurants is located off such a nondescript city street, down a dark alleyway, and just below a seedy-looking casino. The approach is distinctly unglamorous, but U Kastelána isn’t really about glamour – for the most part, anyway.

The menu is fairly extensive, made up mostly of French- and Czech-inspired cuisine like seared foie gras, grilled pigeon breast, and svíčková na smetaně. Yet some pretty clichéd Asian dishes are listed here, too – tuna sashimi, coconut-milk-and-coriander tiger prawns, sesame-encrusted tuna steak. There’s nothing wrong with fusion cuisine, but at U Kastelána, the Japanese and Thai additions come across as a poorly-integrated afterthought, an attempt by the kitchen, perhaps, to show off their worldliness (the restaurant has also been known to hold occasional Yoshoku nights featuring Euro-Asian degustation menus). Introducing patrons to unusual flavors might be an admirable ambition, but in this case, the pursuit of trendiness is just a little too obvious.

The most satisfying food was usually the simplest. A loin of lamb entrée (470 CZK, pictured above), cooked to still-pink perfection, was incredibly tender and moist, the meat so aromatic that it would have been foolish to overwhelm it with pungent side dishes. Instead, the lamb came with an appropriately understated potato terrine and some mildly brittle large white beans. The poultry consomme (60 CZK), too, was rich in flavor and low on frills, served with just a couple of delicate homemade chicken ravioli. And a berry and vanilla cream dessert (180 CZK), made with plenty of fresh (not frozen) berries, was refreshingly light and elegant.

It’s clear that some careful attention is being paid to the quality of U Kastelána’s ingredients, but there is still the occasional oversight. The rice croquettes that accompanied an Asian-inspired sea bass (380 CZK) dish were made with cheap short-grain rice. And executive chef Michal Göth appears to have a great fondness for truffle oil – an inexpensive condiment sometimes used to add a false air of luxury to a dish (truffle oil is actually made with olive oil and a laboratory-created chemical compound, not with actual truffles; many respected chefs have sworn it off altogether).

Fans of U Kastelána like to praise the restaurant’s service. Apparently, the waiters are familiar with the regulars and treat them all like family, which is very nice indeed. On my visit, though, I found myself wishing my server was as well-acquainted with his shower as he was with his customers. Receiving a waft of armpit stench along with your honey-glazed pork belly (pictured below) is never the most appetizing way to start a meal. I’ve definitely smelled worse in other restaurants (exclusively in the Czech Republic, I might add), and maybe the guy was just having an off day, but… he really should never have an off day. None of us should – and especially not when our job is to reach over the heads of people who are in the midst of savoring an expensive dinner. Oh, well. Even with all that fancy fusion food, I guess some traditions are hard to break.
Of course, no one could review U Kastelána without saying a few words about its most famous tradition: the fried pigs’ ears appetizer (195 CZK). Pigs’ ears are indigenous to a number of cuisines around the world, including in Chinese cooking and in black American soul food. Here, they’re sliced up into long curly question marks, deep-fried and served with garlic, mushrooms, and a large green salad. What do they taste like? Kind of crunchy, kind of chewy, and really greasy.

Pretty good, in other words. But maybe not quite as good as you might have hoped.

U Kastelána
Kotlářská 51a
Brno
map
Tel: 541 213 497
Open Mon-Sat 12:00 – 24:00. Closed Sunday.

images: www.ukastelana.cz

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Restaurant Review: Oliva

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 26/04/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.

What happened to Oliva?

A year ago, I gave this cozy Prague 2 Mediterranean restaurant a great review. The food was honest, the service intimate and friendly, and the prices more than fair. When friends asked me for restaurant recommendations, I’d name Oliva as one of the few dependable mid-scale restaurants in the city.

Recently, after a long hiatus, I ate two meals there. The first was passable; the second was miserable. I wish I’d sent my friends someplace else.

Oliva is owned and run by a Slovak couple, Peter and Svetlana Červenka. After racking up some gastronomical experience in Vienna and Berlin, they realized their dream of opening a restaurant in Prague by taking over the space vacated by Le Bistrot de Marlène two years ago. Mr. Červenka used to work as a waiter for restaurants Pravda and Kampa Park, and he and his wife now serve most of their customers themselves. The personal attention is in accordance with their vision of Oliva as a casual neighborhood restaurant with good-quality food at decent prices. Unfortunately, the Červenkas seem to have forgotten some of their original intentions.

To those familiar with the typical life cycle of Prague restaurants, Oliva’s decline isn’t much of a mystery. We’ve seen it happen again and again: a new restaurant opens up and the owners try their very best. They take pride in their cuisine, and they smile a lot at their customers.

But after gaining a few good reviews and a regular flow of patrons, they become complacent. Maintaining a consistent level of quality hardly seems necessary now that the restaurant has made a name for itself. If we cut a few corners, they think, no one will notice.

Well, I certainly did -- and I can’t be the only one. It’s not hard to figure out that an entrée advertised as stewed chicken with fresh fig sauce (270 CZK) should probably include fresh figs in one form or another. It didn’t. The sauce might have had some traces of dried fig in it, but it was so watery and flavorless that it was impossible to tell. The chicken was pretty tasteless too, and on the dry side.

I would have expected the accompanying gnocchi to be homemade. But no, these potato dumplings were the same ones you’d find in Billa’s cold foods section, packaged in plastic and sporting a two- to three-month expiration window.

The source of the pan-seared foie gras (235 CZK) was similarly questionable. Where could they have possibly found this lumpy, vein-y, unevenly-textured mess of a duck liver? And if good-quality foie is a little too expensive for Oliva’s menu, then why serve whole foie gras at all? They would do better to offer only their foie gras terrine (225 CZK), a preparation more suitable for lower-grade liver.

Even some basic dishes seemed to confuse the chef. Lavender honey duck breast (375 CZK) ordered medium rare arrived medium well done (an almost standard Prague restaurant mistake, but frustrating nonetheless), and was tough and chewy as a result. And the molten chocolate cake with pistachio sauce (145 CZK) that I’d almost peed my pants over when I wrote the last review was now half-collapsed and mushy, like a big mushroom that had been stepped on. There wasn’t even any hot melted chocolate flowing from the inside -- obviously a criminal mistake as far as molten chocolate cakes are concerned.

I was further annoyed by Oliva’s backward way of dealing with the smoking issue. Instead of putting smokers in a room of their own, the non-smokers are punished by being forced to sit in a small corner space of only three or four tables isolated from the main part of the restaurant.

Any establishment that truly puts stock in the quality of their cuisine should be as non-smoking as possible – completely so, if they are progressive enough. To allow the main serving room to be inundated with tobacco smoke (potentially, anyway; on both my visits, there didn’t appear to be any smokers at all) is to send out a signal to patrons that the food at this particular restaurant doesn’t deserve to be savored to the fullest degree.
In a way, of course, it doesn’t. Of the six dishes I recently ate at Oliva, only one was worthy of being served: the tiger prawns with beetroot tartare and tarragon vinaigrette (195 CZK). The lightly-grilled shrimp were spongy and perfectly cooked, served over a spicy salad of beet chunks, raw onion, and fresh parsley. I was pleased to see prawns paired with something a little more robust than the more typical sweet mango chutney or plum sauce; they can take bigger flavors than they are sometimes given credit for.

The other dishes had a few good elements – the baked grapes still on their stems served with the duck, or the luscious pistachio sauce that came with the failed chocolate cake – but the food was overwhelmingly disappointing. Even so, I’m sure that most customers will keep returning to Oliva, at least for a while. The service there continues to be friendly and the interior (inspired by olives, naturally), is warm and unassuming.

Not very long ago, when the three most fashionable eateries in town were all owned by Kampa Group, Prague was a city where restaurants could afford to let their quality slip. There wasn’t really anyplace else to go, and most of the patrons were unsophisticated enough to swallow pretty much anything if it looked like nouvelle cuisine. But today, Prague is on its way to becoming a major European capital. And just as is in other major European capitals, restaurants here should be called out when they decide to lower their standards and raise their prices. There’s too much competition now – and restaurant-goers are becoming too discerning – for it to be any other way.

I still really want to like Oliva. But if I told you it was a good restaurant, I’d be lying. At this point, Oliva is just okay.

And, if only because I’ve seen them do better, ‘okay’ simply isn’t good enough.

Oliva
Plavecká 4
Praha 2
map
Tel: +420 222 520 288
Open Mon – Sat 11:30-15:00, 18:00 – 00:00. Closed Sunday.

images: www.olivarestaurant.cz

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Restaurant Review: Pizza Nuova

This review originally appeared in Czech translation in the 19/04/08 edition of Lidové Noviny.

After eating dinner at Pizza Nuova, I felt sick to my stomach.

That’s never a good sign for a restaurant. But in this case, my nausea was to be expected. How else could I possibly feel after eating five different kinds of pasta, a few varieties of pizza, some creamy risotto, and a great big slice of tiramisú?

The all-you-can-eat restaurant concept is one of America’s less appetizing exports. It involves paying a set price to eat as much greasy food as you can until you either vomit or surrender. In the U.S., there’s usually a big hot and cold buffet so that you can serve yourself exactly what you want in whatever massive quantities you require.

When they opened Pizza Nuova, the Ambiente Restaurant Group decided to do all-you-can-eat a bit differently. Individual dishes can be ordered off the menu as in a normal restaurant. And, other than the antipasti bar, there are no buffets; waiters come around sporadically with little pizza and pasta pans to serve you themselves.

The problem with this modified system is that you don’t always get to decide what you eat. Each dish is brought out one at a time, and there’s no way of knowing which foods will be offered to your table later. Should I have this spinach gnocchi? What if I’m too full to eat the spaghetti Bolognese? Apparently, you are free to tell the waiters what kind of dish you would like them to bring next, but because this wasn’t made clear anywhere in the restaurant, I didn’t get a chance to try it out for myself.

Of course, you don’t have to finish what they give you; I ate only a few bites of most of the foods I sampled. By the end of the meal, I was stuck with a nasty-looking plate covered in stale lasagna and half-finished pizza crusts.

I had lots left over not only because I’d wanted to taste as many different dishes as I could, but because the food just wasn’t very good. Almost every dish was too salty. The penne all’ arrabbiata tasted of little besides garlic. Some of the pastas were on the dry side, as if they had been waiting too long to be served, while others seemed unnecessarily rich and creamy. Made with imported fresh mozzarella and baked in a wood-burning oven, Nuova’s pizzas aren’t too far from the Neapolitan pies that Ambiente claims to emulate. But even these weren’t exactly right – their pizza crust was very doughy, almost to the point of sogginess, and the tomato sauce was marrd by too much salt.

There are some rare moments of excellence here, as in the case of a porcini mushroom risotto made with Arborio rice and cooked perfectly al dente, or a tiramisú that’s just as creamy and espresso-soaked as it should be. Still, there aren’t enough highlights to really make the place worthwhile.

Pizza Nuova seems like a great deal: all-you-can-eat pizza and pasta for 328 CZK (or 295 CZK before 18:00) and unlimited access to the antipasti bar for 275 CZK, with the pizza / pasta / antipasti combo-punch available for 515 CZK (or 475 CZK before 18:00). Tomáš Karpíšek, head of Ambiente, has struck gold yet again – customers have been flocking to Nuova since it first opened, eager to stuff themselves with limitless amounts of Italian-esque grub.

But how much pizza and pasta and marinated eggplant can you really eat? That depends both on your eating capabilities and how long you’re willing to sit in one spot.

Nuova occupies a large 2nd-floor space next to the Kotva department store and across the street from the Palladium shopping mall. Big windows let diners look out onto the hustle and bustle while they eat, and the interior is decked out in inoffensive beige leather and wood paneling, making for a warm, lively atmosphere. There’s even a play corner to keep the kids occupied while their parents are gorging themselves.
But most of the restaurant’s seats are benches that don’t have any back support. The uncomfortable seating arrangement doesn’t seem to be a coincidence; in fact, it appears to be a part of Pizza Nuova’s larger plan, one that makes sure that all-you-can-eat diners don’t eat all that much.

During the three or four dinners I’ve had at Pizza Nuova, I’ve noticed a few suspicious patterns. Waiters seem to bring out the heaviest courses, such as gnocchi, risotto, and white pizza, towards the beginning. Only after you’ve filled up on these leaden treats do they start to come around with lighter (and usually more expensive) fare.

The wait between dishes can be tedious, and once you’ve been eating for a longish period of time, there’s always a conspicuous break in the meal service, a solid ten or fifteen minutes during which no food is brought out at all. As scientists have explained to dieters for years, the brain has a certain lag time when it comes to realizing that the stomach is full. So when the waiters come back after the pause with a pan full of four-cheese gnocchi, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you suddenly don’t feel so hungry anymore.
And then there’s the aforementioned liberal use of salt, which serves the dual purpose of filling up the stomach and encouraging the ordering of additional beverages (incidentally, a friend told me the other day that he “almost died of salt poisoning” after eating at Restaurante Brasileiro, the all-you-can-eat Brazilian version of Pizza Nuova).

If all this seems a little paranoid, it shouldn’t. The Ambiente restaurant chain owes its success to the shrewd decision-making of some very good businesspeople; for better or worse, as with all good franchises, very little goes unplanned.

So while the service at Pizza Nuova is usually friendly and polite, I can’t help but feel that they’re trying to cheat me a little bit. That might be all right if the food was somehow exceptional, but it really isn’t. It’s not good enough to make me want to go there and order a plate of pasta or a pizza off the menu, and it certainly isn’t good enough to pay extra for all the different variations to converge in my stomach and meld themselves into a big, salty, carbohydrate cream-ball.

Just the idea, in fact, is making me feel a little bit ill.

Pizza Nuova
Revoluční 1/655
Praha 1
map
Tel.: +420 221 803 308
Open Mon - Sun 11:30 – 23:30

images: www.ambi.cz

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Food news: Food and drink fests, and a sweet new hideaway for Luka Lu

Official dates have been announced for the second annual Prague Food Festival, with the feasting set for a few months earlier this time around. From June 20th to the 22nd, you'll be able to sample selected delicacies from some of the city's finest restaurants, including Aromi, Allegro, Essensia, maze, and The Sushi Bar, under open summer skies at Žofín on Slovanský Island. Tickets should be on sale soon.

And there's a whole new kind of food fest coming to Prague this year, too: the Czech Beer Festival, which is touting itself as the largest gastronomic event in the Czech Republic. With an enormous supply of beer to be tapped into glass mugs, an extensive menu of local specialties, and an anticipated attendance of 150,000 - 200,000 visitors, the 10-day guzzlathon promises to be every bit as raucous and sloppy as Munich's famed Oktoberfest. Still, its organizers insist that they plan on encouraging the "sensible and cultural consumption of beer." We'll see how well that goes for them...

On a recent trip to Balkan restaurant Luka Lu (formerly Louka Lu), I discovered that they've transformed the drab courtyard out back into a picturesque winter garden. It's quite removed from the front part of the restaurant, so you really have to know the room is there in order to find it, but it's really adorable and cozy -- definitely worth a special visit. Go have a look and let me know what you think.

images: praguefoodfestival.cz, staropramen.cz, lukalu.cz

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Apologies...

...for the lack of posts. Prague Spoon restaurant reviews will be returning in a few weeks, and I'll be putting up some smaller posts in the interim.

Thanks for your patience! See you soon.

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