Thursday, 9 May 2024 Prague, Food

Written 2 June 2024

I would like to tell you that we do things on these Viking cruises other than eat. But not today I'm afraid, because today, truly, all we did was eat.

I slept like a log after the long air-travel day and the orientation walking tour, except for a while after the Westminster Oaks Front Desk called me to ask whether Maintenance had finished the job I requested last week. I explained, perhaps a little curtly, that it was 1:00 am where I was, and please don't call me about that for another three weeks!

I'm usually up by 6:30 or 7:00 am on the second day of a cruise, but this time I didn't wake up until 8:45! The Hilton Prague Hotel has excellent black-out curtains. But once I was up, I headed down to the lobby restaurant for the usual large hotel breakfast buffet.

In the lobby, on the way, I passed this wonderful "naked" clock (viewed from the back; the hands are on the other side).

Surprisingly, smoked salmon was nowhere in evidence, though four other smoked, pickled, and otherwise treated fish were include in this array of cold selections. The smoked trout (upper left corner) was excellent. Othere choices were pickled herring, soused herring, mayo-free tuna salad, cold sliced roast beef, quinoa salad, hummus, baba ganouj, and egg salad—heaven forbid some breakfast item essential to some visitor should be omitted.

The labeling could be a little wonky. The dish labeled "salsify salad" clearly contained nothing but fresh sliced cucumber. (In the mirror-image display at the far end of the display, that spot was occupied by something that could, in fact, have been salsify salad.)

At the right is the array of cheeses, bell pepper chunks, cream cheese, cottage cheese, feta-like "Balkan" cheese, salad greens, pickled vegetables, "Laughing Cow" cheese, butter, and several sauces.

Then came the pastries and and some of the breads. Note the chocolate frosted doughnuts stacked on wooden posts. This is only a small sampling of the offerings, which also included big soft pretzels, chocolate muffins, and chocolate chip cookies. At the two ends of the extensive hot buffet were two eggs-to-order stations.

Among the hot selections were two kinds of sausage: skinny gray/brown links labeled "pork" and fat, bright-red links labeled "chicken." I thought the labels might be switched, but I took them at their word, and they were right. The skinny ones turned out to have natural casings and to be very good indeed.

There was even a dispenser, in an area labeled "Vegan corner," filled with a very varied assortment of mixed nuts and dried berries from which you could make your own ground-to-order nut butter. It was very tasty!

At the right here is my first plate, from 12:00 o'clock: bacon (shiny and leathery rather than the preferred crisp and dry), scrambled egg, a bite of pickled herring, smoked trout with sour cream and minced red onion, a disk of hash-browns, a crispy vegetable pot-sticker, a raisin swirl bun, a pain au chocolat, and in the middle a skinny pork sausage. At the push of a button, the machine dispensed me a decaf latte macchiato.

One thing missing from the buffet was good still water. In this part of Europe, "still" is used very loosely. You never know from brand to brand, whether you'll get really still water or whether it will be only slightly fizzy or just really sour from subsparkling CO₂ content. The "Aquila" water supplied by this hotel, both in the rooms and on the breakfast buffet was slightly fizzy. Fortunately, the tap water was both safe and palatable, and the lemon slices floating in the dispenser of tap water on the buffet were few and worn out, so the water was okay.

After breakfast, I went back up to my room to work on transcribing the previous day's notes. David tells me he straggled down about 11 am and found the buffet breakfast over and the hotel's bistro not open yet, so he went across the street to a little shopping mall (the kind that's basically a tunnel through a building lined with shops on both sides; we'd walked through it the day before) for a blueberry muffin and hot chocolate.

We met at the Viking desk at 1:15 pm for our afternoon's excursion, the Prague food tour! And this was my kind of food tour—rather than hiking all over town for a taste of this and a taste of that, we were chauffeured in an 8-passenger van (with one other couple) to three widely separated venues for a three-course lunch.

The first stop, for our appetizer course, turned out to be literally around the corner from the Mucha Museum, which we planned to visit the day. The van actually dropped us off right in front of the museum, because that was the place the driver could most conveniently stop. On the corner between the drop-off point and the restaurant was occupied by a building (now a Thai restaurant) decorated with two panels like the one at the left illustrating the various occupations of the Czech people. This side seemed to feature the domestic and rural occupations, whereas the other (out of the shot to the right, at the other end of the white sign in Thai) showed the mechanical and industrial ones. I think the guide said it was some sort of guild hall at one time.

The restaurant we were going to is called Špejle, which means "skewer." It serves what has become a popular Czech form of food, called chlebíček—, small open-faced sandwiches, essentially Czech tapas. Our guide said they were introduced in the 1920's. The restaurant, which is about 10 years old, has stretched the format to include small salads and other things served in small dishes, but what every item has in common is a skewer, sometimes with things skewered on it for cooking, like marinated chicken chunks, but most just stuck into it. Some items have two skewers—I didn't see any with more than that—and the deal is that you help youself from the buffet of skewered items, and at the end you pay according to the number of skewers you have accumulated in the little cylindrical container at your table. Each skewer will set you back 33 Czech crowns (a crown is worth a little less than a nickle, so that's around $1.50). The guide said a "normal meal" is 8 to 10 skewers' worth and that chlebíček— are also a good afternoon snack.

She went on to say that most locals eat five times a day, some nonstop. The general belief is that the largest meal should be breakfast, followed by a lighter lunch and dinner, and that the lightest should be 3–4 hours before bed.

Here are some of the choices we walked by on our way to our table, ranging from BLT's to figs and walnuts on cream cheese, to turkey and salad, to raw ham, to shrimp and cucumber. Other choices included dishes of olives, spring rolls, and stir-fries.

In the right-hand photo, tiny schnitzels, lasagnas, sauerbratens, chicken wings, pork bellies, and pulled pork sliders. Some of these had two skewers, so they'd cost you 66 crowns.

At the left here, more hot dishes, also with two skewers, and at the right some of the desserts!

The back wall of the restaurant, which was long and narrow and lit from above by a skylight, was entirely covered with real, living plants.

Back in the van, we were driven to our main-course venue past these two imposing structures. The one at the left is the Prague Opera, which must also stage ballets, since it was draped with banners advertising Coppélia.

The main course was roast duck, served at a historic restaurant aptly named The Blue Duck. It was accompanied by potato dumplings, sautéed kale, and stewed red cabbage and was also yummy! I asked whether this preparation was the famous "Prague duck," but the waiter said that, no, it was just ordinary roasted duck.

I had high hopes for the potato dumplings, which were cylindrical, white, about an inch in diameter, and cut diagonally at the ends. But alas, they were worse than the Karlsbad dumplings—stiff, gummy to the point of rubberiness, and unappetizing. Everything else was delicious, but in the dim light I couldn't get a photo in good enough focus to look like anything. With this course, wine and beer were included

Between stops, our guide continued to tell us about Czech food ways. Pork is more common than beef, and beef more than veal. Occasionally you may encounter a turkey schnitzel. Chicken was never mentioned. Potatoes very typical, roasted, mashed, and in dumplings. Rice is common, and Italian food is popular. The most popular vegetables (outside asparagus season) cabbage, spinach, sauerkraut, broccoli. Mushrooms are popular; people like to collect their own to eat fresh and to pickle. Knowledge of mushrooms is gained at home, within the family, not at school. Mushroom poisoning among locals is very rare, but as everywhere foreigners poison themselves, mistaking local species for those they knew at home.

Soups are important, especially in winter. Examples are clear soups with liver dumplings, pumpkin soup, and dill soup with mushrooms. Also in winter sweet meatless dishes are served as main courses, like dumplings with fruit inside, semolina with chocolate or cocoa, and bread or rice puddings.

She also pointed out an interesting mobile statue of Franz Kafka, in a park we drive by. The trees in the way kept me from getting a good photo of it, but it's made of layers of shiny silver plaques, and the layers apparently rotate on some sort of schedule, so that the image of Kafka appears and disappears as the horizontal slices line up or fail to do so.

The dessert venue turned out to the restaurant in the Municipal House theater we saw the day before, next to the Powder Tower, the one featuring the Tim Burton exhibition. The building and its interiors are vaunted as Art Nouveau, but the room we were in said mostly Art Deco to me. The cover of the dessert menu, however, was definitely Art Nouveau—if the lady in the medallion isn't actually by Mucha, she could fool me.

Inside the menu was the choice of cakes on offer, shown at the right.

As we drove afterward, locust trees in bloom everywhere, and I spotted one of those a one-wheel no-handle Segways that are so popular in Paris.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing our guide told us all day was that, when the city was struck with extreme flooding in 2002, our hotel preflooded its underground portions (parking garage, storage cellars, etc.) with clean water, which kept the flood waters out, making clean-up much easier after the flood receded!

Written 3 June 2024

We got back to the hotel later than promised and found we had only about an hour before we had to whistle up our Uber to get to our 5:30 pm dinner restaurant, Zvonice, in yet another historic venue—the 7th and 8th floors of an old stone bell tower! (Fortunately, it's the only historic tower in town equipped with an elevator.) The Viking staff recommended it when we weren't able to get into the Imperial.

At the left is the tower as we approached it.

At the right is David, perusing the huge, thick menu at our table, which was wedged between the window admitting light to the right of him . . .

. . . and this bell. I took both the photo of David and that of the bell without leaving my seat at the table. Space was tight.

After an outstanding amuse-bouche of a single herb-marinated shrimp on a toast triangle with herbed cheese and dots of balsamic reduction, we limited ourselves to a main course each and split a dessert.

Fortunately, the pages of the menu (which looked as though it had been printed and bound by Gutenberg) were thick and sparsely populated (and each entry was extensively described in Czech, English, and German, so we weren't there all night reading it. The wine list (leaning against the post in the photo of David) was equally voluminous.

David chose venison tenderloin with two kinds of bread dumplings: the usual one made of chunks of bread (still too tough for our taste) and a new one that seemed to be just a white yeast bread dough cooked (probably steamed) as a dumpling. It was much tenderer, somewhat more robust than, but otherwise similar to, Wonder Bread. Where it has been cut into quarter spheres, you can see that it has a single crouton embedded in the center. Apparently, it's traditional to embed from 1 to 3 croutons in the center of this style of dumpling (probably, IMHO, as insurance against a gummy center if the dumpling should be undercooked). The pastry circle in the middle of the plate was filled with cranberry sauce (sweeter than American-style cranberry sauce).

I had traditional Bohemian braised veal cheeks in a citrus sauce with a tower of bacon-and chive-studded crushed potatoes. It was described as accompanied by carrot chips and watercress—those turned out to be the orange and green bits on top of the potatoes: fried carrot shreds and very young watercress sprouts.

Both sauces were quite sweet, because fruit had been puréed in with the other ingredients.

For dessert, we chose "baked chocolate truffles," sided with lemon sauce, sour cream, berries, and raspberry sauce. I had trouble visualizing what a "baked chocolate truffle" would look like, other than just a puddle of melted chocolate, but the truffles had been coated as though for croquettes—when we cut into them, we found the puddle of melted chocolate, delicious with the various sauces. The grid in the middle is made of melted sugar.

At the right is another view of the tower, the face you see if you walk 90° around it to the left from where I took the first photo. We were seated just behind the window above the large banner.