Don’t go back to the places where you felt happy, the old saying goes. Ignoring the well-known maxim, I revisited Prague Restaurant, home to some of the most vivid moments of my childhood, which reopened in April after nearly two decades of abandonment.
Back in the 1980s, Prague was the first restaurant I sampled in my life.
I was five or six at the time and most restaurants were hard to get in to, but Prague – sitting in a luscious green park in the southern end of the capital – was an exception.
The place is housed in a two-story white building with pompous columns strangely reminiscent of colonial style houses.
It survived the Soviet decay just like the large exhibition center next door built to show off the achievements of socialist economy.
Getting a table back then didn’t involve waiting for hours in line or bribing a doorman.
All this had turned Prague into the number one neighborhood restaurant for local residents.
It may sound impossible, but I do recall looking on a beetroot salad as a starter in the menu.
Being the cheapest dish, it cost less than one Soviet ruble (between a quarter to one U.S. dollar, depending on whether an official or a black market exchange rate was used).
Two people watch swans gliding on the Prague’s lake. (Alexey Furman)
I was puzzled as to why restaurant cooks decided to cook something that you could eat at home.
Yet, the darn cheap beetroot salad, swathed with mayonnaise and seasoned with chopped garlic, was also the Prague’s most popular dish and one of the house specialties.
It still escapes me why this salad was so popular. It might have been due to the sliced prunes, a delicacy hard to find in Soviet grocery stores.
Nearly three decades on, the restaurant has reopened.
Its building, which a couple of years ago seemed on the verge of collapse, underwent a fancy restoration that must have cost a fortune.
A pond nearby that had dried out and overgrown with grass now has water and a couple of white swans graciously gliding in front of the guests.
Ever since the place reopened in April, I wanted to compare the new Prague, which promotes itself as “legendary,” to the place I remember from childhood.
More importantly, I wanted to see if its food matches the location, the money invested and the new status.
And so I ended up with a group of friends at a table on the winter terrace – overlooking a nice park and a children’s playground – as it was too cold to eat on the lake terrace.
Despite being very friendly with a waiter, we only got one menu per table. It turned selecting our meals into a team-building exercise with three of us nearly bumping our heads impatiently turning the pages.
Restaurateur Viola Kim (C) (Alexey Furman)
What happened next was a bit more unpleasant, as the restaurant seemed to have run out of anything we tried to order.
Even though the Prague menu is far from extensive and, excluding the Japanese dishes we decided to skip, has only five pages, gone were most of the fish dishes and nearly half of the desserts.
Feeling embarrassed, the waiter said that we came at the end of a busy weekend; hence they were short of supplies.
Yet it seems a little strange and unprofessional that after investing so much into Prague’s state-of-the-art renovation that the managers would not bother to fill up stocks to last the whole weekend, including Sunday.
Finally, after an annoying trial-and-error selection process, we ended up with salmon fillet with spinach (Hr 125), trout with almond sauce (Hr 114), a Porterhouse steak (Hr 380) and a salad with melted cheese and cedar pine nuts (Hr 110).
When it came to the fish, my friends thought that it was too plain for its price and the “legendary” status, but it still tasted as good as a simply grilled fish does.
Ordering the pricey steak, my friends seemed a little surprised that the waiter never asked how it should be done – well, medium or rare. Yet, the meat turned out pretty good, if just a little dry.
Munching away, we noticed the room getting busier. The most amazing thing was seeing many families with small children despite the fact that there’s no smoke-free zone.
‘Swan Lake’ ballet in restaurant Prague under the open sky (Alexey Furman)
Diners in casual wear, with some sporting shorts and flip-flops, looked too relaxed to care about anything.
When it came to desserts, four of the nine menu items were missing.
Yet the waiter, who seemed more knowledgeable about the sweet section than any other, quickly talked us out of ordering the most expensive item – Tollegio and Gorgonzola cheeses with pumpkin jam and nuts for Hr 125. Instead, he recommended that we try the carrot and ginger pie (Hr 57).
The pie was arguably the best (and also the cheapest) dish we ate at Prague that evening, which distantly reminded me of the story of the garlic beetroot salad from when I was a child.
Polishing our dinner off with cold white house wine (Hr 99 for a half liter), we stayed there for some five hours.
Exploring the restaurant’s classy and smart interiors with its own library full of old books, I even thought that I recognized a posh reincarnation of the table that my family always took back then.
All in all, it was refreshing to discover that even age-old maxims can be wrong: I don’t regret coming back to Prague and will do it again.
Prague Restaurant,
1 Akademika Hlushkova Prospekt,
tel. 526-9990, praha-restaurant.com
Kyiv Post staff writer Vlad Lavrov can be reached at [email protected]
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