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