Dear food and coffee fans,

welcome to a blog about Prague gastronomy, its tales and history, and the first one of a series of articles about Prague cafés. Prague café is not just a term resonating, especially in contemporary Czech politics, as a mocking designation of Prague liberals. Prague cafés used to be in the center of cultural, political and economic life for many years. Artists, politicians, intellectuals, and industrialists met there. Since a regime of parliamentary democracies is generally beneficial to the ties between intellectuals and coffee shops, we can observe, in the example of Prague, the sharp decline of their role in the “communist” period and the equally rapid rise in the post-communist period.

Coffee came to Europe from the Middle East through the Venice harbour. There is also the second oldest café in the world – Café Florian (established in 1720) – which is still in operation today. The first Prague coffee house was founded already in 1711 by a coffee specialist of an Armenian origin. It was located in the Renaissance house At the Three Ostriches (U Tří pštrosů) nearby the Lesser Town tower of the Charles Bridge. However, this one, unlike Café Florian, has not survived. Cafés (kavárny) were originally called “kafírny” there. And even today we can find a reminder of these times in the Lesser Town in the form of St. Omar´s Café (Kafírna u sv. Omara).

The oldest operating café in Prague is Café Slavia founded in 1884 in Lažanský Palace opposite the National Theater. This location is not random. A year ago, the National Theatre had been reopened for the second time and Slavia intended in advance to become a meeting place for Czech patriots. A café boom occurred in the 19th century, and it is also the time when the European capitals were tearing down medieval fortifications and decided to spread into neighborhood. There was a space left after the walls, where lofty avenues with many massive palaces grew up. The avenues were used by burghers for Sunday walks and social promenades. They are these so-called corsa that were in most cases the places where important coffee houses were spreading like a wildfire. The same happened in Prague. The oldest Prague cafés are situated on the National Avenue, although the moat of the Old Town Walls was already filled in 1781. Let´s focus on particular cafés and their stories now!

The café bearing a name referring to the ideals of patriotism and belonging to Slavicity hosted a crowd of personalities of Czech culture during its existence. First, Slavia benefited from a convenient location next to the National Theater, later it attracted not only the visitors of the Golden Chapel (nickname of the National Theatre). There were Bedřich Smetana, who also lived and wrote the Bartered Bride in the same house, the writers Karel Čapek, Vítězslav Nezval and the Nobel Prize winner Jaroslav Seifert, the painters Václav Špála and Jan Zrzavý, director Miloš Forman (Amadeus, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and a number of famous actors among regular guests. Slavia became the meeting point of dissident intelligence led by Václav Havel in the 70s and 80s. He loved the view of the Prague Castle and the Charles Bridge from Slavia. It is said that history was written on both sides of the Slavia´s masonry (inside the café as well as outside on Národní třída). Madeleine Albright and Hillary Clinton visited this place after the Velvet Revolution. The second one of the ladies tried a long tradition of absinthe drinking here. Slavia was originally in Art Nouveau style. However, it received its present form of French Art Deco in the 1930s. The stuffed donuts and snails are typical for Slavia. I am going to mention these delicacies later again.

There is another beautiful café with a long tradition and turbulent history on the opposite bank of the Vltava River. Café Savoy was founded in 1893 and it was originally seen as a decadent café. The dominant element of the interior is the magnificent Neo-Renaissance ceiling, which was covered before the First World War and gradually forgotten. The coffee house was changed to little shops at that time. It was opened again as a meeting place after the Velvet Revolution. There was a popular smoky let´s say barrelhouse in the 1990s. Subsequently, there was a reconstruction and a surprising revelation of the lost ceiling. There is a luxurious restaurant known for its breakfasts, Czech snails, lavender lemonade and the Prague ham today. The snails are not as much imported in the Czech cuisine as it might seem. During the First Republic (the interwar period), the gratinated snails were a favorite delicacy of the Czech upper class, often served as Christmas Eve lunch, if the people did not want to fast. The music video of the famous song Když muž se ženou snídá (When a man and a woman are having a breakfast) by Karel Gott was filmed there.

I have promised to you a story about filled donuts. Thus, we will talk about the humorous novel Saturnin by Zdeněk Jirotka and the donut wars in Slavia and Café Imperial next time. Meanwhile, you can prepare some munitions.