A Taste of Home: Czech Republic

“A Taste of Home” is a regular magazine column in which we ask the natives of a particular country to introduce us to their national cuisine.

“This has really become the meeting place for us,” says Czech Embassy staffer Veronika Musilova, sipping a glass of Staropramen at Czech Pub. “I can’t come here at the weekend without meeting some of my Czech friends,” laughs Veronika, before confessing that some of her mates may even show up later that evening. This was a Monday.

Veronika is adamant that the beer is important. “It’s not Czech cuisine without Czech beer. This is the only place in Beijing you can get draft Czech beer. Most of our breweries are now owned by multinationals that are focusing on getting their bigger brands into China – Czech beers aren’t their priority.” Czech Pub has three types of Staropramen (RMB 25-30) on draft: lager, “red” and dark beer.

We order the sirloin in cream sauce with dumplings (RMB 65) – “If you think of one Czech dish, that’s it” – schnitzel and potato salad (RMB 42), and, with a sense of both excitement and foreboding, fried cheese with fries (RMB 60). The Czechs don’t make any grand claims for their cuisine. “We’re a simple people, quite a poor country, so a lot of the dishes are very hearty – potatoes, cabbage, meat.” Still, I expected a little more from the sirloin and dumplings. The meat is a little tough, resisting rather than complementing the creamy sauce. The dumplings are, as Veronika points out, similar to sliced-up mantou. “It soaks up the sauces so well,” she adds.

The schnitzel and potato salad (RMB 42) is more rewarding, and revealing of a historical legacy. “We always joke that all the cooks in the Austro-Hungarian empire were Czechs,” Veronika laughs. “The aristocracy was Austrian or German, the laborers were Czech. So a lot of very typical Austrian dishes are actually Czech.”

We tackle the deep-fried cheese, a large block of chewy, melted dairy served in crisp, golden breadcrumb. “They didn’t originally have this on the menu,” Veronika explains, “But there was such demand that they had to add it. I think the cook sort of hates it, because there’s no creativity involved – it’s just fried cheese. But everyone loves it. It’s something I have every time I go home."

It’s undeniably great, though it can’t be healthy. I wonder if deep-fried dishes are as common in Czech cuisine as they are prevalent on our table. “Quite common,” Veronika confirms. Does that have an impact on the nation’s health? Our host seems hesitant. “Yeah, we’re definitely not the healthiest nation. But when people used to eat these traditional dishes regularly they didn’t really have a problem with obesity. Now everybody eats healthier – perhaps our metabolism can’t cope so well now.”

Veronika praises the staff at Czech Pub on achieving a reasonably good level of authenticity, but some traditional dishes remain elusive. “One thing they don’t even attempt here is that lots of Czech desserts are based on poppy seeds, which are hard to find here. In the Czech Republic, you’ll find cakes with poppy seed fillings. Here, you just can’t do that."

So what about shopping for flavors of home? Inevitably, for citizens of a small country, shopping is often about finding the closest approximation. “One thing I think of is mustard,” says Veronika. “Every country’s mustard is a little different. In Beijing there are good German mustards, French mustards, but not our mustard. That’s definitely something we bring from home."

And Czechs, being European, have the inevitable dairy fetish. “Our cheese is special in its own way. In the Czech Republic we’d use a cheese called hermelin for the fried cheese. But you can’t get that in Beijing, so they use Camembert here – the taste is almost the same, but not exactly. I have a visitor coming this way, and that’s what he’s bringing me! Then there’s tvaruzky, this really smelly Czech cheese. Sometimes I ask visitors to bring it, but it stinks up their luggage.”

Czech cuisine is unlikely to ever take Beijing by storm the way that, say, Spanish restaurants have over the past couple of years. But in this little enclave, Beijing’s Czech exiles have all the potato dumplings, schnitzel and blocks of deep fried cheese they need. Oh, and don’t forget the Staropramen.

Czech Pub. Daily 11am-11pm. Ritan Highlife, 39 Shenlu Jie, Chaoyang District (8561 5568) 捷克餐吧, 朝阳区神路街39号日坛上街

Click here to see the November issue of the Beijinger in full.

Photos: Judy Zhou