Kuchyň Restaurant, Prague: Steak Tartare and Beer in the Salm Palace
When the Salm Palace was getting ready for a new tenant, the architect Tereza Froňková found old meat hooks in the ceilings and flues running up into the chimneys. The building had remembered all along what the floor plans had long since forgotten: that these rooms once did the cooking. So the restaurant that moved in under those ceilings in 2018 may not have had to invent a name at all - it only had to read one off the ceiling.
Kuchyň is an Ambiente restaurant in the Salm Palace on Hradčanské Square, a few steps from the gates of Prague Castle, and it cooks Czech cuisine from old cookbooks - the classics, with no modern flourishes.
Pots Instead of a Menu
Tomáš Karpíšek, the founder of Ambiente, brought the idea back from a family restaurant on Crete where guests get no menu: you walk up to the stove, look into the cooks' pots and point. That is exactly how Kuchyň started out - as the group's twenty-sixth restaurant. Soon after it opened, a reviewer for the Czech business weekly Euro rechristened it "a concept that devours itself": during the lunch rush, ordering at the stove apparently held guests up more than it charmed them. These days there is a regular menu with prices on the website, but the open stove has stayed - you can look your food over before you decide on it.
The man at that stove is Marek Janouch, who has spent more than twenty years at Ambiente and ran the kitchens of the Lokál pubs for years. From old cookbooks he cooks the repertoire that people used to call palace cuisine: roast poultry, whole joints of meat, game, sauces and side dishes that have all but vanished from Prague menus. The restaurant says it draws on books that palaces have cooked from since the 16th century - for a place that sits inside a palace, that sounds almost like an obligation. With it comes tank beer, poured to the same standards the bartenders at Lokál follow. Steak tartare with toasted bread is 335 CZK (13.40 EUR) on the menu.
An Archbishop's Palace and a Month in Insolvency
The Salm Palace went up in the early 19th century for the Prague archbishop from the Salm-Salm family; the Schwarzenbergs took it over after him; in the 20th century the building spent decades falling apart, and today it belongs to the National Gallery. The quickest turn of all came in the spring of 2020: with the tourists gone, Kuchyň fell into insolvency and reopened a month later - reporters wrote at the time about a restaurant that had risen from the dead. It is open daily and you can book a table on the terrace in advance, which is worth knowing before you set off up the hill to the Castle.
Tartare and Plums on the Terrace
I come back to Kuchyň again and again on my wanderings around Prague, and it is usually something simple that takes me there: a well-poured half-liter of Pilsner Urquell after a walk through the castle gardens. It rarely stops at that, though. Last time I added steak tartare with fried bread to the beer, and even though I have preferred my bread dry-toasted for several years now, I finished these fried ones down to the last piece. On the long terrace with its big tables you also get a view of your neighbors' plates, so I ordered one more thing: roasted plums with quark and gingerbread crumbs, a few ordinary ingredients tuned so well that the plate was empty before the glass was. The prices match the setting and the quality - and within sight of the Castle, that is not a sentence you get to write every day. I go to Kuchyň for one beer. It has never once ended at one beer.
Kuchyň
