Czech gourmets like to enjoy their meals best at 40 Štěpánská street in Prague.
Two restaurants, which ranked among the ten best Czech restaurants offering the best dishes in the newest edition of the gastronomy guide Grand Restaurant, are based at this address.
The Alcron Restaurant placed first in the current ranking, while the other of the Radisson SAS Alcron hotel’s restaurants, La Rotonde, ranked seventh.
Several hundreds of anonymous evaluators decided about which Czech restaurant prepares the best dishes. They shared their opinion with the publisher of the only Czech gourmet guide, Pavel Maurer.
Degustation victory
A public vote is a relatively changeable matter and so this year’s Maurer’s Top 10 is only a bad copy of last year’s ranking.
This year’s winner, Alcron, ranked only tenth last year. At that time, the chef in Štěpánská was Jiří Štift, whose post was taken by Roman Paulus in the middle of the year.
“I’m glad that guests did not lose their trust in Alcron after the chef changed,” Paulus told HN yesterday.
He admits that he was worried how guests would react to some of the changes he introduced at the restaurant.
“It was not only a partial deviation from fish dishes, but an overall change in concept,” the chef said.
Paulus serves degustation menus to his guests that relies on smaller portions and a bigger variety.
These days, Alcron’s gourmets can expect dishes like carpaccio of Norwegian langoustines, or cutlet and cheek of suckling piglet served with Granny Smith apple marmalade or braised young leeks and lentils, which are served as a main dish.
A sweet grand finale of tastes on Štěpánská can be for example pineapple carpaccio, elder blossom tart or Grand Marnier parfait.
Last year’s winner dropped out
While last year, Prague’s hegemony in the top ten restaurants was broken by Karlovy Vary’s Promenáda and Tuchoměřice’s Auberge de Provence, this year Brno’s restaurants scored. And so gourmets from southern Moravia reached new gourmet heights with the Italian Rialto Ristorante and Brno’s fixed star U Kastelána, which ranked sixth with regards to its dishes on offer. In Prague Le Terroir and V Zátiší (both from Zátiší Group), and Allegro also ranked among best Czech restaurants, with the last one mentioned being the only Czech holder of a Michelin star. Last year’s winner, the Prague restaurant U Lípy, dropped out completely from the top ten. A new representative of the traditional Czech cuisine, of which Lípa was a representative in Maurer’s ranking, is La Degustation Boheme Borgeoise. La Degustation’s team of chefs headed by Oldřich Sahajdák offers domestic traditional dishes, such as confit wild boar from Šumava with hip sauce, barley dumplings and baked chestnut purée.
