Prague, with its beautifully preserved Old Town filled with welcoming cafés, beer halls and restaurants, should be high on your list for a weekend break this winter.

There’s a far more cutting edge side to the ‘Paris of the East’ too. Here’s where to eat in Europe’s cosiest city…

Field

The restaurant that proves the Czech star scene is not a fluke. In a quiet corner of Josefov, Field takes Bohemian ingredients seriously, Šumava forest mushrooms, river fish, game, Moravian wine, and applies technique learned in kitchens across northern Europe. Playful without being gimmicky, and priced at a level that would be unthinkable for the same cooking in Paris or Copenhagen. The city’s most reliable special occasion.

La Degustation Bohême Bourgeoise

The restaurant that changed Prague’s idea of what Czech food could be, built around nineteenth century Bohemian recipes rebuilt with modern craft. The tasting menu is long and theatrical, served by chefs at an open counter, and it makes a persuasive case that Czech cuisine has a serious history worth excavating. Set aside an evening.

Benjamin

Michelin recognition without any of the ceremony. A tiny room, a handful of seats, one menu and a kitchen you can practically reach into. If the full tasting menu marathon at La Degustation feels like too much commitment, this is the elegant compromise. Book well ahead, because there are only so many chairs.

Eska

Karlín’s bakery and restaurant in a converted factory, and the clearest expression of modern Czech cooking anywhere in the city. Sourdough baked on site, fermented and preserved vegetables, smoked fish, and a menu that treats humble ingredients as though they were luxuries. Open from breakfast, which makes it an unusually useful address.

Sansho

Whole animal butchery meets Asian flavours, served as small plates in a relaxed room with no menu to speak of: you tell them what you like and food starts arriving. It has been a favourite of Prague’s food obsessives for years, and remains the most enjoyable dinner in the city for anyone who wants to be surprised.

Lokál

The beer hall reinvented. Long communal tables, brisk waiters, and unfiltered Pilsner Urquell straight from tanks in the cellar, poured with the care the Czechs consider normal and everyone else finds astonishing. The food is the canon done properly: fried cheese, schnitzel, goulash, pickled sausage. Several branches across the city, all good.

U Kalendů

For the real thing. A pub that opened its doors at six in the morning for workers coming off shift in the Communist era, and has changed remarkably little since. No English menu, no concessions, no tourists, and a Michelin Bib Gourmand to its name. Bring a translation app, order the daily soup and whatever roast pork is going, and eat extremely well for very little.

Café Savoy

The grand café experience, under a restored Neo Renaissance ceiling in Smíchov, and the answer to a cold Prague morning. Breakfast runs long and lavish, the pastry counter is a serious operation, and the room is beautiful enough to justify a queue. Come for eggs and coffee, stay for cake, leave regretting nothing.

Kuchyň

Up at the castle, with a view over the rooftops that most restaurants would charge triple for, and a lovely conceit: there is no menu, so you go into the kitchen, look in the pots and point at what you want. Czech home cooking, generously served, in one of the best positioned dining rooms in central Europe.

Mlýnec

Right beside Charles Bridge, with windows onto the Vltava and the bridge itself, doing elegant modern cooking with a Czech accent. It is the place to bring visitors you want to impress, and it manages the difficult trick of occupying prime tourist real estate while still being genuinely good.

Also worth your time:

Naše maso in the Old Town, a butcher’s counter serving the best beef sandwich in the city; Sisters for chlebíčky, the open sandwiches Czechs eat standing up; and any neighbourhood hospoda in Vinohrady or Žižkov, where the beer is cheaper and the atmosphere better than anywhere near the Astronomical Clock.