Výčep Restaurant, Prague: Jiří Hrachový's Eastern Moravian Cooking in Vinohrady
When a Czech says he's "popping into the výčep", he doesn't mean food. In the Czech pub hierarchy the výčep sits at the very bottom - a taproom where beer is poured - once even straight out onto the street, into a jug you brought yourself, and where the cooking goes no further than whatever fits in the fridge. That's exactly the word this place hung above its door, and it does the opposite.
Výčep Restaurant on Korunní Street in Prague's Vinohrady is a modern eastern Moravian pub that bakes its own bread, makes its own cheese and cured meats and has taken Czech cuisine all the way to a Michelin Bib Gourmand - the award for places where you eat superbly and pay sensibly. Few places in Prague poke fun at their own name so consistently.
An Eastern Moravian Chef on Korunní
The kitchen is run by Jiří Hrachový; he comes from eastern Moravia and puts the recipes of his region's grandmothers back on plates - foot-trodden sauerkraut, buckwheat, pig-slaughter specialties - honed by stints in Michelin kitchens. He came to cooking the long way round: before he started cooking, he went through the French Foreign Legion and spent five years in English kitchens. The place he runs together with Vojta Nemrava opened in December 2018 and today belongs to the Kolektiv restaurant group; Forbes summed up the confusion around the name with the headline "Fine dining instead of a cheap Vinohrady pub". You'll find Výčep on the Czech Michelin list, and I rank it among the best answers to the question of where to go for lunch in Prague.
Bread, Cheese and Ketchup, All Made in House
On paper the concept sounds like every other farm-to-table menu; the difference is how much of it they really do themselves - bread, cheese, cured meats, herb oils, even smoked ketchup - and the rest they forage, grow or buy from farmers they trust. The dining room doubles as a pantry: rows of preserving jars sit on the shelves, with vegetables pickling and kombucha fermenting inside them - decoration you can eat. More and more Prague kitchens these days run on fermentation and in-house production, The Artisan or Štangl in Karlín for instance, and Čep a Pec runs its own bakery too; but only one of them adds an eastern Moravian repertoire on top.
A Weekly Menu and Beer from the Cutting It Short Brewery
The place runs on a weekly rhythm. The lunch menu changes every week - one soup, around six mains and a single dessert - and the restaurant's Instagram gives the new one away before they can get it printed; in the evening they cook from a more ambitious menu. On tap you'll find an eleven- and a thirteen-degree beer (measured by the Czech scale of original gravity) from Dalešice, the brewery made famous by the film Cutting It Short. At lunchtime the room fills up without fail and you're out of luck without a reservation - thankfully the online system confirms one almost instantly.
The Jitrnice I Came For
I've had lunch at Výčep several times now and I have one recurring problem with it: it keeps wrecking my personal rankings. The beef broth with a liver dumpling, noodles, buckwheat, roasted vegetables and a mound of fresh herbs for 125 CZK (5 EUR) had an unbelievable color and was the best broth I've ever eaten. The potato dumpling stuffed with smoked rib meat, with foot-trodden sauerkraut and a bacon sauce for 285 CZK (11.40 EUR), was in the same league - the sauce reduced right to the edge, exactly my kind of thing. And the caramel choux ring for 155 CZK (6.20 EUR) sounds like a rip-off until it arrives: airy vanilla and caramel cream, caramelized hazelnuts in it, and nobody skimped on the glaze. It's my favorite dessert and I've eaten a great many of them - none has ever beaten this one.
Mainly, though, I came for the jitrnice, our pork liver sausage, with Brussels sprouts roasted in butter, new potatoes, fermented wild garlic and mustard sauce for 275 CZK (11 EUR) - and Výčep makes that itself too. Jitrnice isn't restaurant food to me. As a small boy I helped out at home pig slaughters: we kept a pig and made our own jitrnice, blood sausages, prdelačka, the pig-slaughter blood soup, boiled pork, head cheese and cracklings. Getting to live through a home pig slaughter one more time is one of my great wishes, and so far it hasn't come true. The jitrnice from Korunní was magnificent, and it's the closest I've come to that wish yet.
Výčep
