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Traditional Slovak bar serving cheap, delicious Slovak food. Efficient service and friendly, cosy atmosphere.
Zamocnicka street
This is the heart of Boston's North End, once the Italian enclave in the region. The street is lined with cafes, bakeries and several styles of Italian restaurants - most with open air seating during the summer. Great for people watching, it connects the Financial District to Boston's harbor. A nice small park connects Hanover St to the Old North Church.
Access by Goverment Center T (subway) station.
The best place to spend an afternoon in Prague! Marketed as a Parisian style cafe there are plenty of places to sit and enjoy your meal, a terrace area and a Billiard Hall. The food is freshly cooked and includes local dishes as well as Vegetarian options, alcohol is also served and there are international newspapers available.
Louvre Cafe
Narodni trida 20
New Town, Parague 1
Nearest Station: Narodni trida (line B)
Part of a pub/bar chain run by Pilsner Urquell. I believe there are three or four situated throughout Prague, the best in my opinion being Celnice (near the Obneci Dum) and Olympia (on the other side of the river). Though they look very plush, the food is great value and delicious. The beer, naturally is divine and very reasonable considering the location of the pubs.
V kolkovnì 8, 110 00 Praha 1; Tel: +420 224 819 701
Go to the Museum absorb some modern Czech Art & Culture, then if the sun is shining eat at Restaurant belonging to the museum, The Sovovy Mlyny. Sit on the terrace, have a long leisurely lunch. Enjoy beautiful views of The Vltava and Charles Bridge. Listen to the Wier. Don’t let the cold put you off. They bring blankets!
www.museumkampa.cz/ Sovovy Mlyny Restaurant U Sovovych Mlynu 2 Mala Strana, Prague 1 Czech Republic.
This has to be the best restaurant in Venice. I have visited Venice three times in the last eighteen months and have eaten here on two of the three nights on all visits. A little off the beaten track, it is a favourite with locals and specialises in seafood (it is near the fish market at Rialto) and fresh, seasonal produce. Try out a delicious white wine from the Veneto, La di Motte(?).
Calle della Regina (Rialto), 2262; Tel: 041 5222881;
www.veciofritolin.it
Terrace restaurant/bar with great views across the whole of Praha. Foods good as well!
Hradcany tram routes 22, 23, stop Pohorelec
This downtown area by the lake is a great place to visit in the summer. As well as a great place to walk by the side of Lake Ontario, you can catch the ferry across to the Toronto Islands, watch an open air performance for free, browse a craft fair and eat food from various ethic menus.
Ornate,art nouveau hotel- excellent value for a cake and a drink and fabulous, if slightly worn surroundings- real character and a welcome break from all that walking and absorbing the sights!
Wenceslas Square- central prague you can get there by tram- the best way to travel around Prague.
If you like cocktails and good vegetarian food, this is the place to go. There's a cafe, cool bar and night club all in the same place.
Belehradska 120, vinohrady; metro I.P.Pavlova
Only a few minutes from Rialto Bridge it must be hard to find better value in this area. A garden that must be lovely in sunny weather and a very lively trattoria. On a damp Sunday the very friendly staff were almost overwhelmed with diners but kept it all going well. Quite a wide choice of pizzas (all around 8 Euros) and an extremely good value for money set lunch for either 14 or 16 Euros. It's all the traditional courses that you would expect (spaghetti al ragu, brescaiola, spaghetti with mussels and clams, squid) but each course cooked well and very tasty. Half a litre of good wine for 8 Euros. Unhesitatingly recommended - and as almost always in Venice restaurants, perfect for children too.
Sottoportico di Siora Bettina, Santa Croce 2338. Phone 041 5241169
An ace restaurant serving traditional Czech grub, U Seturu has a lovely cosy cellar feel about it with some brilliant black and white photographs of the city on the walls. The Goulash in particular is some of the est you'll find anywhere, and the best thing about it is the price: around 200 K per person for a slap up nosh and a glass of beer. They also have an even cheaper (and no less delicious) lunch menu.
Address: Palackeho 2, a little road running between the main streets of Jungmannova and Vodickova in the New Town (Nove Mesto). It is next door to a hotel. There is a tram stop where these two roads meet. Nearest station is Mustek.
Plovdiv, 120km out of Sofia - on the airport side, is the place to go to experience the "true" Bulgaria. Or should that be Macedonia? The people here will talk to you for hours about their ancestry, so you may end up slightly confused!
However, confusion is all part of the fun – for example when your table begins to fill up with a lot of the world’s most tantalizing white wines, you are, of course, at first confused at why the Bulgarians export such cheap rubbish while keeping these liquid treasures for themselves, and when lots more start to arrive, you reach the section in your guidebook which reminds you that nodding horizontally is affirmative, so each time you thought you were saying “no”, it was “yes” - you’ll work it out eventually!
So why else Plovdiv?
In the first instance it’s not Sofia – which most locals will lecture you about; “Sofiacentrismus” is a political disease which has caught on since the fall of communism, giving rise to a huge hate and jealousy of the capital which seems is the magnet for FDI, tourism, etc as the government seems to ignore all other areas of the country (apart from the Black Sea resorts).
Secondly, you will get to Plovdiv in a luxury hire car for about $35 per day, faster and more comfortable than to anywhere in the traffic-snarled smog of Sofia, via a rolling carpet of comfortable uncrowded motorway. That should take about 1 hour – no more no less, as speed cops are everywhere pulling the faster cars, but also the slower ones!
Thirdly – it’s cheap! Amazingly cheap! One “Lev” is 50 euro cents, so it’s easy to calculate exchange rates on the go, but when you eat and drink like Donald Trump, do lots of tipping, and count in the accidentally-ordered extras from the nodding errors, and find yourself paying a bill of say 15 LEV (EUR 7.50), your mind is going to reevaluate exactly why you do that commute every day back home!
Fourthly, the people are wonderful, happy and very proficient in English! There is no misery here, so you don’t have to feel like Kofi Annan listening to woes of hard lives, gypsy issues, “fall of the wall”, etc; they are happy – as have been the people here for 3000 years, as would you if you lived in this little part of heaven with beautiful weather all year around, fresh produce abundant in fields and gardens, etc.
Fifthly, the standards here will shock you! As in they are so high! Your ROI brain will wonder how every restaurant and bar can be more stylish than any in Manhattan, and the service more friendly (genuinely as tipping doesn’t feature) and professional at these prices. It’s like Terence Conran was let loose here with one of the Roux brothers as part of a community service operation.
Sixth! There are lots more reasons to visit Plovdiv, lots more reasons to rush there before the Eurocrats get there to impose lots of regulations, and we hope to continue - especially when we start to talk about skiing opportunities here! Meanwhile check the links!
Enjoy!
Much maligned street with a large number and variety of bars, pubs, clubs, restaurants. A few years ago it was trendy, now looked down upon as a bit commercialised, victim of its own success, betraying its indie roots. Still, if you are after a few drinks and a good party atmosphere with everyone up for a good time, this is the place to go. On Friday and Saturday nights see the place heaving with people, many of them heaving.
Stodolni ulice, pretty much in the centre of town. One or two tram stops from the Elektra Kavarna/cafe
Great pub, popular with students, young crowd. Beer garden out back. Stock Czech menu, so smazeny syr, hranolky a tatarka (fried cheese, chips, tartare sauce) is good stuff. Some other good bars in the area, too, including Akropolis club and not far to walk to see the radio/TV tower with statues of babies crawling up it.
Bořivojova 110, Prague 3 Trams 5, 9, 26, 55 and 58 (stop Husinecká).
This is a restaurant precinct near the University of Sydney, and home to lots of goths, gays, upwardly mobile africans, professors and students, and people who like to people-watch. There are some 60 restaurants in the 2 kilometres or so, all of which are reasonably cheap and usually good. You can get a good feed for about $20 a head. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Bring your tastebuds! Several pubs and a couple of backpackers' joints.
Take a bus from the city (438, 426, 423 ,422), go past the university and get off when you smell cooking and see weird folk walking around. Or take a train to Newtown.
You'll find it in any guide book. Get there at 2.45 pm or earlier to queue on any day. It opens at about 3.05 and you file in dutifully.
Husova 17. About 10 mins walk from Charles Bridge sort of on the way to the Old Town Square
Classic beer place in a cellar. Get away from the hordes of tourists. The place is actually two pubs, one upstairs, one downstairs. The downstairs one is the gem. Lovely beer, classic Czech food (full of cholesterol and stodge, but tasty) and the obligatory surly waiters. In the evenings you probably have to reserve. If there's just a couple of you, it's generally no problem to just ask people at a not totally occupied table if they can budge up. Drink: beer, maybe a Fernet to finish off. Food: Vepro knedlo zelo (roast pork, duplings, sauerkraut) or smazeny syr, hranolky a tatarka (fried cheese, chips and tartare sauce)
Pivnice U Rudolfina: Krizovnicka 10, a couple of blocks south of the Rudolfinum concert hall/exhibition space
The bar where the coolest contemporary Czech Film (by THE Czech director and THE Czech actor) was filmed, reasonably priced drink, relatively varied food and relatively unsmokey, the best bar I found in eighteen months of living there.
Come out of Staromestka metro, turn right then left then right, follow the left pavement until you come to a fence, follow that round the corner and you're there.
Just on the Old Town Square and opposite the Astronomical Clock is a roof garden where there are wonderful views of the centre of the City. The food might not be great but for an hour or so mid-afternoon when your feet are feeling tired it is a great place to be.
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