I’ve always had the impression that restaurants in hotels offered a certain quality in their fare. After all, it makes sense for a hotel to want to have good restaurants in their establishment, and there’re many famous restaurants peppering the local hotel scene. Specific to Amara Hotel, the Hyang To Gol Korean restaurant is very good too, so I thought that The Prague couldn’t be far off.
Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
The Prague is a strange place. It is a restaurant with live music which serves homemade Czech beer - so it feels like a restaurant, bar and lounge at the same time – which, based on the menu, seems to serve a mixture of traditional Czech food and local fare (like ngoh hiang, otah and briyani).
I think the fact that it appeared to serve both Western and local cuisine should have been a warning sign. Our group wasn’t going to have local food in a restaurant, hence we went for what appeared to be the more traditional Czech cuisine: the pork schnitzel, crispy roasted duck – which the menu claimed was a traditional Czech dish – and pork knuckle.
We were stunned when our pork schnitzel came out – pardon the poor images as my phone’s camera sucks:
Was that achar we saw masquerading as sauerkraut? (Oh yes it was indeed.) And what was Thai sweet chilli sauce doing in a Czech dish? And who would have thought that you’d see those fries outside of kopitiam western food mains? Luckily the schnitzel didn’t taste too bad, and we were kinda hungry then.
The crispy roasted duck was altogether another level of nonsense. Unfortunately I don’t have pictures, but it was so authentically Czech that its “dumplings” were three thin slices cut from a larger mantou (the steamed kind you can get with your chilli crab) and it came with SWEET HOISIN SAUCE.
The roasted chicken we ordered when another member of the group arrived was equally kopitiam-like – just think of the spring chickens you can get from the Western food stalls, and was again accompanied by achar and Hoisin sauce, as well as Thai chilli + mayonnaise in one of those sauce dishes pictured below. Besides the utter lack of authenticity, the half birds were passable at best – they were too dry and the meat was not flavoured with seasoning of any kind.
Again, the only things authentic about the pork knuckle were its size and the mustard – there we had some Hoisin sauce again. The entire knuckle was a bit dry due to to the batter around it, and the unseasoned meat had a gamey taste.
To be honest, the beers at The Prague weren’t that worth shouting about either. Its light beer had little taste and was more like a mildly alcoholic soft drink, its half-and-half (half light, half dark) was still a little too much on the light side, and though its dark beer was nice it would have been considered a half-and-half elsewhere.
And the strangest thing was that no one else at The Prague seemed to mind the complete lack of authenticity of the food and it was nicely filled on a Friday evening. How could anyone visit this restaurant, which claims to serve Czech food but actually doesn’t?
I thoroughly enjoyed the company and it was fun laughing at the sheer ludicrousness of the food at The Prague, but the restaurant itself has definitely gotten a big fat black mark from me.
