Restaurants

I wanted to wait for sometime to pass before discussing this topic to give an impartial view. After being here since late March, having tried a wide range of what is available at the grocery store and restaurants, sometimes paying more than I reasonably should have to test whether the cost was justified in the resulting quality, I feel I have enough data to discuss this point. This isn't a discussion about Czech cuisine, a possible sequel to this post, which is full of interesting dishes with some ridiculously labor/time intensive recipes that are shared throughout the central European region. This is more a criticism that offers my hypotheses as to why restaurants here are in the state they are in.

I think the biggest factor regarding the satisfaction, both in regard to taste and presentation, of food here is quality control, or rather the absence there of. I don't see myself as a food snob, and I won't fault a restaurant for not delivering culinary gold. Especially for the type of restaurants a person frequents week to week, whether in the US or anywhere else in the world, what the customer expects is the precision/repeatability of the quality of the dish. A person goes back to their favorite Chinese, Indian, Italian, Sushi, etc place not necessarily because they get an orgasm in their mouth each time they go there, but because it hits a certain sweet sweet spot for them on the opposing scales of good taste and affordability, and it hits that spot nearly every time they go. If a favorite restaurant consecutively disappoints one usually assumes a new inferior chef has taken over the kitchen, and the disappointed customer stops going back.

This paradigm does not work for most Czech restaurants, because they really lack repeatability of the quality of what they serve. If I enter a restaurant one day to try it out, I may get one of the best meals I've had since my arrival, memorize this dish as a favorite, and tell myself to make a repeat visit. I may return the next week or even the next day order the same exact thing, and have it fail so badly at matching what I had ordered before I would swear I was in another restaurant.

My coworkers and other Czech people I've met all seem to have similar views as myself regarding the nature of the restaurant business in the Czech Republic (insisting that a proper tasting Czech meal can only be found cooked at home.) Anecdotally they blame the years of Communism, for the government standardization of menus, sourcing of grocery ingredients, and the general apathy when it comes to service that Czech culture in general has been slow to warm up to 20 years after its conversion to Capitalism. Perhaps the latter is the most telling as many restaurants seem to be carbon copies of one another yet there is no sense of competition to outdo each other to maintain customer satisfaction and gain repeat business.

A complaint to the wait staff to see the manager is often met with a shrug or a "I am the manager" sort of response most American waiters probably only dream of being able to say, but know they could never get away with for fear of losing their job or a good chunk of their business. Fear of such a penalty is so unlikely in the Czech Republic you could call it an impossibility. Taking it out of the tip isn't much of a punishment, because this is a country that doesn't expect tip to begin with. The standard fare is simply to round your bill to the nearest 10 Czech crowns, and the difference is considered tip which equates to about 50 cents or less. Even with the surge of expats in recent years who have been rewarding a much generous 10% of their bill, myself included, few restaurants except those that cater towards tourists or have more cosmopolitan owners have utilized this carrot to give themselves and their staff the motivation to match global standards.

See below a link to various dishes I've had some good, most average, and some which can only be described as WTF? failures.

Food

Housing

Before I get into this I got to say my own personal experience hasn't been that bad, and I'm hardly miserable in the Czech Republic. At most, I'm just a bit annoyed at the lack of logic or common decency in some of the things I've heard and observed in situations where an entitled Czech person whether they be a bar owner, apartment owner, or some other kind of authority seriously took advantage of foreigners.

Finding an apartment itself is a major ordeal as many forums that are meant to be directed at foreigners are in fact in Czech :p Many expats a have tried to ban together posting on community portals, but the these threads are generally painfully out of date, and simply aren't active enough to give you quality information. Some expats have even taken to being real estate providers, and there is usually a marked difference in how much easier the contract creation and quality of apartment is. The only drawback is that it tends to be on the pricier side of an intern's salary. A common thing to do is go through a Realtor who will charge you one month rent as his commission on top of you paying the deposit and first month rent to the owner.

Once you've found a place and you're moved in Czech real estate owners are super SHADY to their tenants! I've heard too many stories of how someone goes on Christmas vacation, but leaves the keys to their flat for their friend who needs a place to crash, and that friend getting promptly thrown out by an angry owner the next morning, for not being on the contract, in the snow with all of 15 minutes to gather their stuff; or getting no recourse or restitution when a tenant is kicked out on a whim, because the owners want to renovate less than a month after a tenant moves in (shouldn't the owner been giving at least 2 month's notice for something like this, not taking on a new tenant.) These are such huge "wtf, I've been robbed" levels of shady that I would be shocked to hear in even the most money grubbing cultures.

Thankfully that's not the case for me. My owner is a super sweet grandma with a granddaughter who was born and raised in the US (so I get double sympathy from her for being a foreigner and American), and speaks English fairly well, which is why my flat mates choose her place to begin with.

Summer Festivities in Brno

Summers in general are my most hated seasons. I hate being sweaty, and I hate the explosion of the mosquito population during these months. It does not help that the Czech Rep is not big on AC, and that temperature swings from a rainy 15C to a humid 28C in the course of 24 hours have left me with a slight cold isn't enough to make me feel sick just miserable. Few things are more uncomfortable, while not actually considered sick, than being sweaty as being sweaty, congested, and having a slight cough.

However, one of nice things about Summers is that cities generally take it on themselves to try to get their populations out and about by providing free entertainment in their downtown/ central square areas. Thankfully Brno is certainly not an exception half the week the main square Namesti Svobody "Freedom Square" will host some kind of concert or performance for people wishing to bask in the sun before a late sunset or enjoying a drink to cool of from residual evening heat.

Below a quick video, sorry for the shaking, of a Jazz concert typical of a Saturday night in Brno.



Also I've recently made some inroads into the Brno expat community. The group of AIESEC interns like myself is itself a mini community, but I've found it interesting to compare notes on experiences with the community at large. With companies like IBM and AT&T having large offices in Brno it seems a little weird that they're mostly staffed by foreigners, but their presence is probably the largest factor in rapidly transforming the city into one that can actively engage with foreigners as tourists or residents (it still isn't at adequate levels, but it's certainly made progress from what I heard it was like 2 years ago.)

Within the group I tend to hang out with are two fellow Americans Kyle and Chris working as English instructors, who call me out on how my English has degraded whenever my pronunciation tends to get warbled. Ulrike, a German instructor/tutor, who has turned into my social 411 for events going on around the city. Dario, who loves to call me "Californication" instead of my name, and fulfilling my growing stereotype that all Italians must be awesome at music plays a really impressive improvisational guitar (shown below.)