Prague Beer Zoo

When someone in Prague tells you they are off to the Zoo, they may not be heading for Troja. The city's other zoo has no cages and no opening hours: the animals hang on pub signs and feeding is measured in half-liters. There is no official list of its residents - the idea of doing the rounds of pubs with an animal in the name was born at the taps years ago and every regular counts them differently; the Ambiente restaurant group now even sells a guided walk with a bartender leading the way.

The Prague Beer Zoo is an unofficial trail of Prague pubs with animal names, and it runs through several centuries of pub culture in Czechia - from Baroque pubs below the Castle to a brewery courtyard in Karlín. This article takes you through eleven enclosures: from U Černého vola to Červený Jelen.

Why Prague Pubs Are Named After Animals

The animals on the signs are not a landlord's whim but an old navigation system. Before Maria Theresa ordered houses to be numbered in 1770, people found their way around Prague by house signs - reliefs and paintings above the doorways that even someone who could not read was able to follow. Animals were among the most popular motifs and a color adjective told two houses apart - hence the golden tiger, the black ox, the red stag. The signs could change, too: the house of today's U Zlatého tygra first carried a hoe, then a black lion, and only from 1713 a tiger. The most famous big cat of the Prague Zoo therefore spent most of its career as a lion. Nobody knows who coined the phrase "beer Zoo" - the bartender Lukáš Svoboda remembers hearing it from regulars in the pubs where he worked the taps, and it spread on its own, the way every good pub idea does.

U Černého vola Pub

On Loretánské Square, a few steps from Prague Castle, a Baroque house with a painted sign keeps one of the last classic pubs of Hradčany alive. The house was originally called U svatého Lukáše after the relief on its facade, and the ox most likely ended up on the sign through a simple corruption of the name - the pub is documented here from 1726, and a nickname had all that time to turn into a name. Inside U Černého vola you will find vaults, long wooden tables, a painted coat of arms on the wall and, from ten in the morning, Velkopopovický Kozel and Pilsner Urquell on tap. Painters and writers used to meet here; today tourists who have just walked down from the Loreto sit alongside the regulars.

The kitchen is exactly as big as a pub needs it to be: the menu fits on a single page - olomoucké tvarůžky, our pungent little Moravian cheeses, for 80 CZK (3.20 EUR), marinated hermelín, a camembert-style cheese steeped in spiced oil, and soft washed-rind romadur for 90 CZK (3.60 EUR), fried bread rubbed with garlic, a few sides, and that is it. The last food order goes in at 9 p.m. and it is cash only.

U Hrocha Pub

U Hrocha looks as if it had stood here forever: vaults, wood, a hippo's head above a hand-written list of what is on. Except that it is the youngest of all the "traditional" pubs in the Zoo - it has only been pouring since 1994. When the classic pubs of Malá Strana were giving way to the tourist trade in the nineties, the regulars from the neighborhood moved in together right here, into the Gothic house U Zlatého stromu in Thunovská street, which had previously been a school - and turned a newborn into a cult pub within a single generation. The Chamber of Deputies is around the corner, so over their Pilsner Urquell you will find MPs and parliamentary reporters sitting next to the local regulars.

You hardly need to order at all: a wave of the hand or a nod is enough and the next half-liter is on its way. The bill is a scrap of paper filled in by hand - a large Pilsner Urquell cost 49 CZK (2 EUR) when I visited, a small one 30 CZK (1.20 EUR) (you can see the receipt in the photo) - and it is cash only.

U Kocoura Pub

The Tomcat in Malá Strana is a textbook of Prague architecture packed into one house: a Gothic core, a Renaissance rebuild, Baroque alterations, a Neoclassical facade - and Kozel and Pilsner Urquell at the taps. The house used to be called U Černého orla, exactly like the house of U Černého vola once was; the Prague Zoo was clearly rather fond of trading its eagles away. The best-known story here says that Václav Havel hosted the president of Poland, Lech Wałęsa - I could not find any proof of it, but the locals tell it with such confidence that it has become part of the furniture, and Polish tourists keep coming to this day. It is a few minutes' walk from U Hrocha.

U Zlatého tygra Pub

The house in Husova street is first mentioned in 1360, and the pub that has occupied it since 1864 is the most famous address in the whole Zoo. In the 1830s it held Šocha's patriotic café, which František Palacký used to frequent; what made the Tiger a legend, though, was František Skořepa, who rebuilt the place in 1935 and laid down the rules that still hold today: you do not order beer here, beer is brought to you - the bartender puts a full half-liter in front of a regular the moment he drains the last one. Skořepa is said to have packed the ladies off to the picture house next door so the gentlemen could finish their beer in peace.

The back table by the kitchen door belonged to Bohumil Hrabal - the Tiger was his second home and his study. And on the night of January 10 to 11, 1994, Václav Havel brought Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright here; the American president reportedly put away a schnitzel and three beers, moved on to the Reduta jazz club and the next day skipped his morning run for the first time. A tourist without a regular's standing gets a seat only by turning up early - and humbly.

U Zlatého slona Pub

Havelská street is part of Prague's oldest marketplace, and the elephant arrived there by a detour: the name U slonů originally belonged to the house next door, mentioned as early as 1427 in the chronicle of Bartošek of Drahonice - today's pub merely borrowed it. There are noticeably fewer tourists here than a few blocks away, the Kozel and the Pilsner Urquell come with a loyalty card to be stamped, and a hundred beers earn you an elephant on the wall with your name on it. Not many loyalty programs offer a more lasting record.

U Medvídků Brewery

U Medvídků has the oldest brewing pedigree in the Zoo: beer was brewed here without a break from 1466, when Jan Medvídek founded the brewery, until 1898, when the brewing houses of the Old Town lost out to industrial competition - the last brewmaster, Karel Vendulák, left to run the new Burghers' Brewery in Holešovice. The house then lived on as one of the largest pubs in Prague, hosted Prague's first cabaret, Tingl-Tangl, in the early 20th century, was nationalized in the fifties, and after restitution it got a renovation, a hotel and brews of its own again.

Today, alongside Budějovický Budvar, it pours beers from the revived microbrewery, chiefly X-Beer 33: a lager with an original gravity of 33.48 degrees and around 12.6% alcohol. Its bid for a place in the Guinness World Records came to nothing - there is no "strongest beer" category to get into.

U Dvou koček Pub

The Two Cats on Uhelný trh date their tradition to October 5, 1678, when the quarter around St. Martin's burned down - the fire took 36 houses, and on the site of one of them people started building, and pouring, again. Since 2010 the pub has run its own microbrewery and brews a beer called Kočka - a pale, a dark and an amber twelve-degree lager - with Pilsner Urquell on tap alongside. An accordion player performs every evening, old photographs and paintings hang on the walls, and the story goes that Mozart stopped by and that a young Antonín Dvořák gave one of his first public performances here; there is no evidence for either, but who would begrudge the cats a guest book like that. These days it is a stop popular mainly with tourists.

U Buldoka Pub

The Bulldog in Preslova street in Smíchov is a pub the neighborhood keeps for itself instead of showing it off to tourists. It has run as a sports pub since the late nineties: the interior is covered with jerseys and "souvenirs" from soccer players, athletes and paddlers, and postcards from all over the world fill whatever wall is left. Along with Kozel and Pilsner Urquell it also pours beer from the small Zvíkov brewery.

U Veverky Restaurant

The Squirrel in Bubeneč is a double linguistic trap. The corner house on Eliášova and Jaselská was built in 1911 by the builder Jan Petřák to a design by the architect Kaplický - not the one behind the famous "octopus", who was not born until 26 years later, but his older namesake, whose first name has been lost in the records. And the pub's name is not a house sign either: it used to be known as V Jaselské and, in local speech, U Všetečků after the innkeeping family - their Anna Všetečková stood behind the taps for a full quarter of a century from 1949, and the current name is a tribute to another outstanding bartender - Mrs. Veverková. The only animal of the Prague Zoo that is really a surname washes Bubeneč down with tank Pilsner Urquell.

Dva Kohouti Brewpub

The Karlín courtyard behind Lokál Hamburk used to be an auto repair shop with a spray booth; on November 17, 2018 the first batch came out of it, and Karlín has had a brewery pouring straight into the yard - Dva Kohouti - ever since. The two roosters in the name are presumably the founders: Adam Matuška, brewmaster of the family Matuška brewery in Broumy, and Lukáš Svoboda, a master of the tap from the Lokál pubs. The day-to-day running of the brewery is down to brewmaster Lukáš Tomsa and his twelve-degree lager; guest beers, Matuška among them, pour alongside it. Food trucks park in the courtyard, the interior is the work of Tereza Froňková - and the die-hard regulars argue over whether a place without centuries of history should be let into the beer Zoo at all. It has an animal in its name and an enclosure to go with it; the paperwork will get sorted, no doubt.

Červený Jelen Restaurant

The Stag in Hybernská street is the Zoo on a safari scale. It sits in a palace where Josef Gočár designed the banking hall of the Anglo-Czechoslovak Bank in 1925; the bank left behind a vault with meter-thick walls of concrete layered with iron plates - it survives as a quirk of the interior. The architect Stanislav Fiala had the conversion drawn up as early as 2011, but the doors opened only in 2019, after eight years of work on a listed building.

The numbers match the scale: 2,600 square meters, four floors, seven hundred seats and five private rooms, plus wall paintings by Patrik Hábl and stag antlers from the butcher Josef Ryšlavý. Pilsner Urquell flows from a twelve-tank beer tower, the tallest in Czechia, the taps are in the hands of winners of the Pilsner Urquell Master Bartender competition, and the kitchen relies on meat - they even have wagyu. Die-hard beer drinkers leave the Stag out of the Zoo for the same reason as Dva Kohouti: it is too young. The beer from the tower honestly could not care less.

The Best Route Through the Prague Beer Zoo

You cannot walk the whole Zoo in a single day at any decent pace, and there is no point in trying. Split it into loops: below the Castle, the Ox, the Hippo and the Tomcat sit a few minutes apart; in the Old Town, the Elephant, the Two Cats and the Little Bears fit into one afternoon, with the Tiger and the Stag within walking distance. Dva Kohouti, the Bulldog and the Squirrel are loners - each in a different neighborhood, each worth a trip of its own. And step into the centuries-old places with some humility: a regular has rights a tourist does not, and the bartender has all of them.

Map of the Prague Beer Zoo

I have walked the Zoo in stages myself, and the part I keep going back to is below the Castle - to the Ox for tvarůžky with a Kozel, to the Hippo for a Pilsner Urquell. The ticket to this zoo is not sold at the gate: it takes the form of a hand-written receipt and you pay on your way out.

Dan Špaňhel

I'm Dan. I only write about what I've tasted myself - from street food stalls to Michelin stars. I've travelled half the world for food and tried everything possible - even the impossible.

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