Prague Eats: Pub food part 1 - Lokal
Like in Poland, I basically had three "big" sit down meals, one for each day I was in town. So I got to try three different pubs or beer halls. The first one was Lokal, which is supposed to be an "updated" traditional pub restaurant featuring locally sourced ingredients. Beer is a big part of the experience everywhere in Prague, and here it came as automatically as a glass of water would come to a table in another country - the waiter just walked up with beer stein already in hand and asked "beer"?
The restaurant is in this tunnel-shaped room. Everyone around me was a tourist.
I ordered the Smažený sýr, which is fried cheese. My Polish friend who had recently been to Prague had recommended me try it, and it was starred on the menu as being a specialty of the house. It came with homemade tarter sauce. I also ordered a side of cabbage salad with horseradish sauce, and the waiter recommended a side of mashed potatoes to go with the cheese.
So what does the inside of fried cheese look like? A purely white hunk of cheese. It was less melty and more bland than I was expecting. Funny enough, I had my first experience with fried cheese in Germany, where my friend's mom had prepared some from the supermarket (you can find it in the freezer section in other places, like Germany and the Netherlands). There, it was nice and melty and had a cheesy tang. Here it became a bit laborious to chew bite after bite of a basically uniform consistency and taste. The potatoes were also a bit bland. Thank goodness for the cabbage salad.
