La Veranda Restaurant, Prague: A Tasting Menu Next to a Library of Cookbooks
At La Veranda they sat us at a table right by the bookshelves, and to this day I don't know whether that was chance or a trap. The shelves at my elbow were packed with books about food - old volumes of the Michelin guide, cookbooks from half of Europe - and between courses I kept reaching over: just a minute with Robuchon, just a flip through The Geometry of Pasta, just to pick up the weighty Pražská kuchařka, the classic Prague cookbook, one more time.
La Veranda is a restaurant in Prague's Josefov that has been a fixture of the Czech fine dining scene since 2002 - modern European cooking with a Mediterranean base and ingredients from small Czech suppliers. We came for the tasting menu with a wine pairing. And then the plates started arriving, and the bookshelves got competition they never saw coming.
From Potato Peels to Steak Tartare on a Lokša
The tasting started with a gift from the kitchen. The amuse bouche - literally "a mouth amuser", a little something the chef picks out, not the guest - came as little baskets with dill, set on fried potato peels. What exactly was in the baskets I honestly can't tell you, because the base stole all my attention. Those peels tasted absolutely perfect: crisp, delicate, I couldn't get enough of them. An ingredient that ends up in the bin everywhere else outdid plenty of expensive ones right here.
Before the first course arrived, house-baked bread landed on the table too - a pale sourdough round, a darker baguette and butter to go with them. Butter dusted with paprika is the kind of small thing that shows how much care goes into everything in the kitchen.
The first course was steak tartare made from dry-aged beef, lokša, truffle. Dry aging gives tartare tenderness and a more concentrated, faintly nutty flavor - the enzymes do the work that seasoning otherwise has to make up for - and this one was beautifully seasoned on top of that. What caught me most, though, was the lokša. I know this thin potato flatbread as the side that comes with roast goose back home; here it carried the tartare - it held its shape and was still soft and supple; not crisp, just wonderfully soft. I spent the whole evening hunting for a word for that texture and never found one.
Second course: a tart of duck liver and foie gras, plums, a green walnut. Foie gras is fattened poultry liver - it can be around eighty percent fat, where an ordinary liver is in the single digits - and the tart brought both together, plain duck liver and rich foie gras. The most interesting thing on the plate, though, was the walnut: picked while still green around midsummer, at St John's Day, and steeped in spiced syrup, where it ages for a year and a half to two years - longer than plenty of the wines in the pairing spend in a barrel. An old Czech pantry on a Michelin plate.
The third course switched the menu to vegetables: a pepper stuffed with ratatouille, smoked eggplant, pepper sauce. The only course without meat, and not a token health-food interlude either.
Trout from Mr. Kalenda, Duck from Mrs. Malečková
The menu at La Veranda names its suppliers, as if they were co-authors - and I like that. Fourth course: salmon trout from Mr. Kalenda, roasted cauliflower, raisins, beurre blanc. Beurre blanc is a butter sauce from the Loire that, as legend has it, came about by mistake, when the cook Clémence Lefeuvre forgot to add the egg yolks and tarragon to a sauce for pike. Here the pink fillet came with roe and chives as well.
Fifth course: duck breast from Mrs. Malečková, beet purée with black currant, walnuts, currant sauce. On the plate a pink slice with skin roasted to a deep gold, little balls of beet and a thin slice of beet rolled into a cone. Duck with beet and black currant is a combination built on contrast: the earthy sweetness of the purée against the sour currant - a main course that got by without the traditional dumplings and cabbage.
The dessert was called barley crémeux, beet sorbet, pickled sour cherries. Crémeux is a French pastry format - denser than a mousse, silkier than custard - and building it on barley is a signature move: an ordinary Czech grain, done Paris-style. Beet turned up on the menu for the second time, now as a sorbet - and of everything on the dessert plate that was what caught me most. Beet sorbet sounds unusual, maybe even suspect, but cold and clean is exactly where beet shows what it can do: a sweetness that comes not from fruit but from a root, earthy and round, with a faintly mineral undertone. It refreshes in a different way from fruit sorbets, and I liked it so much I'd happily have eaten a bowl of it on its own. The pickled sour cherries then gave the dessert a tart final note.
The Wine Pairing: From Hustopeče to Sauternes
Each course comes with a 100 ml pour, 50 ml with the dessert - and the cellar took a walk around Europe on the way: three Moravian wines, one German, one Italian, one French. The tartare was opened with the cuvée Auspitz from the Fabig winery. Auspitz is the historical German name for Hustopeče - a young winery there pays tribute to its own town with it and sends a fresh blend of Grüner Veltliner and Sauvignon into the glass.
With the foie gras came Riesling Haus Klosterberg from Markus Molitor - a Mosel winery that plants riesling on practically all of its land and ferments spontaneously in large wooden casks; with rich liver, Mosel riesling is a proven classic - its acidity keeps the fat of the liver in check. The stuffed pepper was accompanied by Gavi Salluvii from the family-run Castellari Bergaglio winery in Piedmont, which grows a single grape - cortese.
The trout was paired with a late-harvest Chardonnay from the Sůkals in Nový Poddvorov in Slovácko, aged in French barrels, and the duck by a Cabernet Sauvignon & Merlot cuvée from Dolní Dunajovice below Pálava, from the Šoman winery. Three of the six pours came from Moravia, and they held their own next to the Mosel and Piedmont.
With the dessert came a Sauternes from Château d'Armajan des Ormes - a sweet botrytized wine from Preignac whose history, as the family tells it, goes back to a visit by Catherine de' Medici in 1565; the first documented bottling is from 1898. Sauternes with the barley dessert closed the pairing as carefully as the Auspitz from Hustopeče had opened it.
A Veranda Just Off Pařížská
An evening like this one is also about the place itself. La Veranda was opened in 2002 by the restaurateur Jurij Kolesnik, who also owns Babiččina zahrada in Průhonice. On the glass by the entrance hangs the Michelin guide's recommendation plaque. Among Prague's tasting-menu restaurants, La Veranda is the established, welcoming one: two decades at the same address on Elišky Krásnohorské Street, a short walk from Pařížská and Old Town Square.
Michelin describes the interior as a corner of an Italian country house, and that fits: wood, upholstered chairs with a leaf pattern, a little flowered armchair, tulips in small vases, none of the chilliness of designer minimalism. I've hardly ever felt as comfortable and at ease anywhere else - it's one of the coziest restaurants I know in Prague. The windows look straight out at the Church of the Holy Spirit, with flowers on the sills - in the evening light it was an unbelievably beautiful sight, and it held my attention just as much as the food and the shelves beside me.
The Library That's Hard to Leave
I have to come back to the library, because it kept me busy all evening. It's no impersonal decoration: volumes of Michelin and Gault&Millau, Gastromapa, Pražská kuchařka, Robuchon's French Regional Food, The Geometry of Pasta - the library of someone who reads about food, not just cooks it. Sit down next to it and you're done for: you'll keep being tempted to pull out this one, then that one, then the one over there, and start leafing through. If that tempts you as much as it did me, ask for a table by the shelves when you book; if you want to concentrate on the food, sit farther away.
The Bill and the Service
The service was lovely - and in a place where six courses and six wines pass across your table, that isn't a detail, it's half the experience. The tasting menu was 2,150 CZK (86 EUR), the wine pairing with it 1,385 CZK (55 EUR) per person. The whole evening had no weak point: from the peels through the lokša to the barley dessert, there wasn't a single stumble. Leaving was about as hard as leaving that library a couple of steps away: one evening simply isn't enough for La Veranda.
La Veranda
