Lonely Planet Prague restaurants

Baroque palaces, cobbled squares and a round-the-clock pilsner moustache – it’s tempting to go with the movement in Prague, but swimming against the tourist wave and you’ll area in certain far more intriguing locations. Head to eight of Prague's hidden secrets, as chosen by

1. Upstairs cafes

Prague is well known for its grand cafes but boost your sights: the town’s many processed and atmospheric downtown cafes are typical on the first-floor, wondrously overlooked by the going to masses. The time interiors tend to be stunning, the coffee unfailingly perfect in addition to wise clients look like they’re speaking about Milan Kundera or their particular newest ceramic collectable. There’s the Grand Café Orient over the Cubist Museum, embellished this kind of step-by-step sympathy perhaps the cakes come garnished with an oddly angled wafer. The fin de siècle Café Louvre, perched over a totally forgettable modern-day rival, ended up being your favourite with Kafka and Einstein, and serves a fabled hot chocolate you are able to sit a spoon up in.

2. Squares, however you may already know them

To shun the gorgeous Old Town and Castle area could be a work of visitor perversity, but Prague’s tale is a long one, and people gothic and Hapsburgian squares tell a couple of chapters. Few places blossomed therefore gloriously as did Prague inside 1910s, whenever entire brand-new suburbs of magnificent art nouveau mansions had been outlined all around the old town, and fortunately the legacy of these breathless years features survived. Lyckovo Square, inside quite sombre Karlin area, provides the most useful before and after overview. But for a far more total and exhilarating appraisal of Prague’s development since 1900, check-out Jiřího z Poděbrad Square, which lies in the distinct shadow of this asymmetric Soviet-built Žižkov TV Tower.

3. Contemporary art

A dozen gigantic children today crawl across the Žižkov television Tower, Prague’s most conspicuous construction; a life-sized Sigmund Freud hangs by one hand from a pole sticking out from a roofing high over the Old Town; as well as in the garden behind a west-side memorial remain a colossal pair of splayed feet – visitors climb a ladder, wedge their particular minds where in actuality the sun doesn’t shine and revel in a video clip of Czech political leaders feeding both slops, as We will be the Champions thunders from a colon-mounted presenter.

4. Pub-breweries

Prague is a country that downs even more alcohol per mind than any various other, however it is possible to find establishments in which high quality is respected above volume. Most of the big Czech brewers are now owned by multinationals, and their mass-produced result stocks little aided by the dark ales and wheat beers used over the land until 1842, whenever a Bavarian brewmaster turned-up to grant the townspeople of Pilsen the present of bland and uniform lager. The old methods were repressed under the Soviets, but because the 1990s, a scattering of minor pub-breweries have actually established across Prague, reacquainting locals with a multifaceted beverage that can be sometimes nutty, occasionally sweet, and sometimes limb-flappingly potent.