Alma Restaurant, Prague: A Michelin Bib Gourmand in a Former Cinema
Above the passageway, a backlit sign reads "Restaurant further in". On a Monday evening the room in front of it is empty - a counter, a coat rack and tables beside the turquoise ALMA neon. Follow the sign through, and suddenly you're standing in a packed dining room where a striking amount of English drifts over from the tables. Alma is a restaurant in a former First Republic-era cinema on Prague's V Jirchářích Street, run by the Kro group: modern Czech cuisine, with a Michelin Bib Gourmand since December 2025.
The Alma Cinema and the Kro Bistros
The restaurant inherited its name from the movie theater that once ran in the building: one old-timer remembered a Bio Alma neon sign that could supposedly be seen all the way from Národní třída, and according to the restaurant's website, Fellini was still being screened here in the 1960s. The street is named after the tawers who once worked fine leather here. So people on this street knew how to make use of the parts of an animal nobody else wanted centuries before anyone cooked here - and today the creamed tripe on the menu keeps that tradition alive.
Alma was opened in the summer of 2023 by Vojtěch Václavík and Petr Němec, who since 2019 have grown a seventeen-seat bistro in Vinohrady into a whole family of Kro businesses: bistros and a café in Vinohrady, Vršovice and Libeň, the KRO Bakery, a catering arm, a line of ferments and the wine importer Alma Wines. Alma stands out from the rest: its roughly 800 square meters fit a café, a fermentation lab and a bar alongside the restaurant. And it's the bar that has made the place famous beyond Czech borders - in the inaugural Europe's 50 Best Bars 2026 ranking, it came twenty-fifth in Europe as the best bar in Czechia.
What Petr Židek's Open Kitchen Sends Out to the Dining Room
The kitchen is run by Petr Židek, a chef with a soft spot for open fire; the other half of the opening duo, Michal Daněk, is now creative chef for the whole group. The cooking draws on deliveries from more than thirty nearby farms, and Alma ferments and ages a lot of its ingredients itself. The tartare comes with a beef garum emulsion (395 CZK/15.80 EUR), the Arctic char with buttermilk and yuzu kosho (385 CZK/15.40 EUR), the langoš with ketchup, garlic emulsion and Kromte cheese (355 CZK/14.20 EUR); the creamed tripe comes with nduja and fennel (385 CZK/15.40 EUR). On the side, there's sourdough bread from the group's bakery with whipped butter (65 CZK/2.60 EUR). Every component on the plate is seasoned on its own, and yet it all comes together; the only catch is that the portions are frankly small, with the starters little more than a few bites.
A Monday Evening for Four and the Question of Price
There were four of us at Alma - friends from university I go out to eat with every so often. For mains we had poached catfish with marinated pumpkin and beurre blanc (635 CZK/25 EUR), its skin charred to finish. The aged duck breast with prejt (Czech black pudding filling baked without a casing), beet and a jus with smoked speck (725 CZK/29 EUR) arrived pink in the middle. Sides cost extra - grilled new potatoes with quark (225 CZK/9 EUR) and pickled vegetables (195 CZK/7.80 EUR), in which the pickled baby carrots may well have been the single best thing all evening. That puts the catfish with potatoes at 860 CZK (34 EUR) and the duck with vegetables at 920 CZK (37 EUR).
All the while, Alma looked after us without fuss: the music was just loud enough not to get in the way, and the staff switched between Czech and English with an accent I quietly envied. The service was the strongest part of the evening: attentive, quick and without ceremony - I'd happily put it up against places a level above.
And then there are the prices. Michelin awards the Bib Gourmand for three courses at a reasonable price - the ceiling varies from country to country, and for Czechia Michelin doesn't publish it. Among Prague's Bib Gourmand restaurants, Alma sits at the pricier end: at U Matěje you'll get a main for 335 to 495 CZK (13.40-19.80 EUR), at Výčep for 385 to 685 CZK (15.40-27 EUR). With portions this size, we ordered the bread twice so we wouldn't leave hungry. Take this as the subjective math of four people at one table, not a complaint - more a report on where prices in Prague are heading. The dining room was full on a Monday night, so in the end I take my hat off to the pricing we'd been shaking our heads over - demand has proved Alma right. There is a cheaper way into Židek's cooking, though: the lunch menu, where a main costs roughly what an evening starter does. And for New Year's Eve, Alma is putting together a tasting menu - details in my article Where to Spend New Year's Eve in Prague.
I skipped the mains that evening: I had the tripe, the langoš and an apple tarte tatin with smoked honey and whiskey ice cream (275 CZK/11 EUR). The tripe was perfect - tender, mildly spicy and light as air. In the tart, the thinly sliced apples were layered so tightly that the cross-section showed no gaps at all, and the base was studded with little crystals of salt. My heart belongs to the classic French tarte tatin, but I appreciated the work behind all that layering. To go with it, three Krystus beers - a non-alcoholic IPA from the Clock brewery that I already praised at Automat Matuška; here it costs 79 CZK (3.20 EUR) for 0.4 l, exactly the same as a Pilsner Urquell. For two smaller starters, a small dessert and three non-alcoholic beers, I paid 1,250 CZK (50 EUR).
But I took home more than the bill. That very week, the sourdough starter I'd been baking bread with since covid had given up on me; a backup survives at my sister's in Moravia. So I politely asked whether they might be able to spare some - I knew they weren't KRO Bakery, but since I was sitting there anyway, it couldn't hurt to ask. We joked that otherwise I'd try U Kalendů, where they also bake their own bread and where I was heading in a week or two. They promised to ask, then nothing for a long while - until the server brought it out: vacuum-packed, with a date on the package and an apology that it was a few days old and they couldn't vouch for it. It was a wheat starter; at home I ruthlessly retrained it on rye, and by morning it had risen beautifully. This is exactly what separates good service from star-level service: a small thing off the menu that nobody had to follow through on - and they followed through anyway. The bread turned out well.
Restaurace Alma
