Lokal, Prague

Czech cuisine took a beating when the Communists took over, but in recent years there's been an effort by young chefs to revive the cuisine and/or put a modern spin on old Czech favorites.  Lokal is one of the restaurants best known for leading the Czech cuisine revival, and it was high on our list of to-dos when we planned our trip.

It's quite a long restaurant, modern yet cavernous in a way reminiscent of old beer halls.  It's a raucous, family friendly eatery that fills up quickly most nights. We enjoyed the vibe very much.

The tank! Lokal's tank is provided by Pilsner Urquell.  For the uninitiated, here's the big deal about tank beer: the beer is fermented from start to finish in this tank, and never touches air until it's poured for the customer.  Because there are no worries about contamination, the ingredients do not have to be boiled.  All the ingredients just steep in water until fermentation occurs, and the end product is unpasteurized.  

In more common beer brewing, all the ingredients are boiled, fermented once in one container, siphoned into a different container for secondary fermentation, and then bottled or put into kegs for sale.  The beer comes into contact with air during each of these steps.  Purists claim that tank beer has better formed micro-bubbles, a tighter foam with superior staying power, and a fresher flavor.  I have to agree; it's one crisp beer.  This tank is probably the #1 reason J wanted to see Prague (no joke!).  When Pilsner delivers the tanks, they write on the clear window the date and time the tank was installed.  That way, you always know exactly what you're drinking.

Little beer, bigger beer.  The standard beer in a Czech eatery is .5L (right).  A small beer is .3L.  We got one of each, and quickly realized that wasn't going to be enough.  Beer in the Czech Republic is so light and crisp, it's no wonder the average citizen drinks a liter a day!  Take a closer look at the beer; as with the tank beer at U Medvidku, the bubbles in the beer are invisible to the naked eye.

Steak tartare.  Lokal's steak tartare is extremely popular, and I can definitely see why.  Meaty, lightly spiced, with tiny pieces of onions adding a little crunch - delicious!  The toasted bread came with a huge garlic clove.  Scraping the garlic over the bread added a whole new flavor layer to the tartare experience.  My only complaint was that this portion was probably meant as an appetizer for 5, not a lunch for 1.  Oops.

And here are a few truly unique Eastern European dishes.  On the left is beer cheese - wow. Talk about your pungent foods.  I can best describe it as a very soft, stinky cheese (think Taleggio) mashed with paprika and a little beer.  It's actually pretty tasty spread on dark rye bread.  But like the tartare, it probably should have been halved or served to a table of 4.  On the right is thin-sliced Prague ham with whipped horseradish.  This was one of those dishes that was so much more than the sum of its parts.  The ham was delicately smokey, and the horseradish was lightly folded into the most airy whipped cream I've ever encountered.  It didn't taste heavy or fatty at all, it was just a thin cloud in which the horseradish was suspended.  Thinking back, it was almost a cross between whipped cream and whipped egg whites.  Almost magical.

We liked our meal at Lokal so much, we went back the next day.  Stay tuned for what we ate the second time around!