We enjoy travel; we must, because we do so much of it. One of the things we enjoy is finding good meals, preferably with some significant local flavor. Sometimes guidebooks or local advertisements help us do that; sometimes serendipity takes over. Two examples from last weekend in Prague...
Serendipity led us to the restaurant "
U Vltavy" ("At the Vltav"; the Vltav is the river in Prague that may be better known as the Moldau). It's on the corner of Brehova and 17. listopadu, not far from the Rudolfinum and just off the Parizska street. (There are accents that I'm not including here because I just don't know how to get them or how they'd work on this site.) GREAT Czech food -- I had a wonderful half roast duck with dumplings and red and white cabbage, and Judy had a venison stew in a really cool bread bowl. But the restaurant isn't listed in any of the guides we saw. (It also has a Greek menu, but we'll stick with Czech food in Prague, thank you.)
The guidebooks, on the other hand, all include the "
Hostinec U Kalicha" on Na Bojisti near the Pavlova metro stop. The main claim to fame there seems to be its link to "The Good Soldier Schweik" described in the pages linked above, and the restaurant walls are
covered with drawings that were (I believe) done by the artist who illustrated the book. Look for the navigable images on the Web pages! More on the book and on Schweik later, but the bar at the restaurant is supposed to be the place where Schweik planned to meet a friend "at 6 o'clock after the war." We had roast piglet there, and again we found this Czech specialty to be really wonderful.
So -- the next time you're in Prague, these are two personal recommedations. I hope you'll enjoy them as much as we did!
From left to right: Prof. and Mrs. Shi, Ke Yang, Judy and me, and Mingmin Zhang and her daughter.
The sixty-sixth birthday is a very special one in China, because six is liu(4), and liu also means "luck". So sixty-six is liu liu, or "luck luck" -- a very good birthday. Our friends made a very special dessert for us, "eight-treasure rice". The eight treasures are dried fruit and nuts in the sticky rice, with sweet red bean sauce as well. Yum! The photo is a dish of eight-treasure rice that they sent home with us and that we shared with Rick for dinner last night. What a treat to have such good friends who spoil us so!
This market opens at 7:30 am, and Judy's always there by 7:15 so she can walk around and find the "specials" -- the stalls that have only one or two packages of berries, or the best tomatos, or whatever else is particularly good that week. She can then stand in line at the booths she chooses and wait for the whistle that lets vendors start selling. And my job is to stand in the second-best line and to carry whatever we buy. That keeps us in fresh vegetables (and other things -- this week, morel mushrooms) for the week to come. It's a great way to start the week!
As for my brothers going into a tea room, those are stories that stay within the family ;^}
But the lid on the to-go cup struck me as ambivalent. One first view, it's a smiley face (how very 80s!) But if you look closely, there seem to be hands on either side of the face; is it Edvard Muench's "Scream"? Or the "Home Alone" movie? Or do I just have an over-active imagination?
