After years of exploring restaurants from Prague's Old Town to quiet Moravian villages, I started writing down what I found. Some meals were extraordinary. Many were simply good. A few were forgettable. These are the honest notes from all of them.
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Czech cuisine gets a bad reputation in travel guides. Too heavy, too meat-focused, too reliant on dumplings. I used to think the same thing until a long lunch at a family-run restaurant outside Cesky Krumlov changed my mind entirely. The svickova was nothing like what I had eaten in tourist traps near the Charles Bridge. It was slow-cooked, deeply flavoured, and served with a cranberry sauce that balanced everything perfectly.
Since that afternoon in 2019, I have been paying closer attention. Czech cooking at its best is precise, seasonal, and rooted in techniques that have not changed much in a hundred years. The problem is finding the places that still do it properly, rather than serving reheated versions for tour groups.
This site is my attempt to document those places, along with notes on the dishes themselves, the beer culture that is inseparable from Czech dining, and the regional differences that most visitors never discover.
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The canon of Czech cuisine is smaller than most people expect, but each dish has a depth that rewards attention. Understanding what separates a good svickova from a mediocre one changes how you order in any Czech restaurant.
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The Czech Republic has the highest beer consumption per capita in the world. Behind that statistic is a culture of brewing, serving, and drinking that is unlike anywhere else in Europe.
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Prague has excellent restaurants. It also has hundreds of tourist traps charging three times the price for half the quality. After years of sorting through both, here is what I have learned.
Read the guideA single meal tells you very little. I return to restaurants at different times of day, different seasons, and with different dishes before writing anything. Consistency matters more than a single exceptional plate.
Every meal is paid for personally. No restaurant has been contacted in advance, no free meals accepted, no advertising relationships maintained. The only thing that influences what I write is what I actually ate.
A village pub in South Bohemia should not be judged by the same standards as a fine dining restaurant in Prague. I try to evaluate each place within its own context and what it is genuinely trying to be.