Czech beer at Lounge Boheme

Lounge Boheme is a little bar tucked away on the corner of Great Eastern Street.  You have to book in advance to get a seat because it’s really a small place.

Once we’d made our way down the newspaper lined staircase, we were welcomed at the bar and shown to our booth.  The furniture has a very 1950s feel about it and the drinks menus are hidden away within the covers of books, written in a foreign language.  Given that Bohemia is now in the Czech Republic I would hazard a guess and say that the books are written in Czech, but given that I went with an Irish guy and an Italian guy, none of us could confirm this.

The bar does serve Czech beer though, along with a range of cocktails, including an Apple Pie Tini and a Porcini Tini.  My Italian friend told me that porcini means mushrooms in Italian, which should have tipped me off to the fact that the cocktail contained mushroom flavoured vodka.  But for some reason it didn’t click, which was why I ordered and ended up drinking something that tasted like chocolaty cold mushroom soup with a vodka after taste.  

Czechoslovak restaurant

Wandering up from West Hampstead tube station gives you the impression that you're heading into a residential area and seems an unlikely setting for any sort of restaurant. And Czechoslovak does seem to have a bit of a private house feel about it mixed with old man pub. Which only adds to the slightly odd dining experience in my opinion.

The restaurant has a beer garden at the back for sunnier days (or hardy customers) but we sat in what was possibly the living room in times gone by. We had Langos, a delicious starter that could have been mind with condimentphiles like me in mind (ketchup, garlic, cheese AND tartar sauce!!!) along with Czech sausage. I had pork goulash for my main course with Czech dumplings, which were kind of like very soft absorbant slices of bread.

Memoirs from a Cold Utopia

Vit Klusák and Filip Remunda presented their art 'Czech Dream : A Documentary Super-Comedy about the Superstore that Didn't Exist' to an unsuspecting public whilst they were still students.

They essentially created an advertising campaign for a fake hypermarket. 4000 people turned up for the grand opening to discover that there was no hypermarket and not all 4000 of them saw the funny side....

More here if you are interested:

Bar Prague

After a lot of walking around the Tate Modern in an ill fitting pair of summer shoes, my poor feet were feeling very sore.

Fortunately for me, Bar Prague was waiting up in Shoreditch.  I'd tried to go once before, but arrived at 11.30, not knowing that it doesn't open until 12.  So I wasn't expecting such a wonderful welcome in the form of several fat old armchairs to sink into whilst I read the newspaper and drank a coffee.

This bar/cafe also has artwork on display and a selection of Czech beers (which you might well expect from a Czech place).