Prague Pizza Putsch

Long ago in the Roaring 90s in Prague I had a blogger gig for something called Pell-Mell: CyberNews for Expats. I had to churn out a whopping two (2) blog posts per week in exchange for rent. And I could choose whatever twitching topic fell out of my pivo-addled brain.

When I completely ran out of grist for the mill, I once wrote an article with the title Prague and the Great Mango Chutney Shortage. Of course there was a mango shortage; nobody here ate tropical fruit in the 90s. There were only about a half dozen Indian restaurants in Prague at the time, and only one of them offered mango chutney on the menu. And it was a Pakistani restaurant. One day they ran out of mango chutney. The shortage lasted for weeks. Imagine my expat rage.

20 years later. There is now an explosion of international dining options in Prague. Now that these ex-Commie fuxes have had 30 years to get with the program, I wonder why, in 2022, you can hardly find a pizzeria or Italian restaurant in Prague with garlic on the menu. Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot. Italian food without garlic is like a day without sunshine.

Pizza Everywhere

As Capitalism slowly oozes over the former commie soil and replaces everything with rampant consumerism, pizza restaurants popped up everywhere in Prague. In fact, I believe that there are nearly as many pizza restaurants in Prague as pubs—and that's saying a lot in the beer drinking capital of the world.

At first the Chinese restaurants starting taking over the failing Czech pubs that only offered warm, flat beer and tepid food with botulism sauce, served by a drunk with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. No wonder the Asians took over. At one point I remember seeing my old street in Prague with up to 15 Chinese restaurants on one street, sometimes two of them were right next to each other. They all had the same photo menus in the window, dishes M1 through M19, all exactly the same chow at the same prices.

Clearly this was an immigration scam. Nobody wants Chinese food in Prague THAT badly. But one thing about the swill: it rarely gave you food poisoning and the staff were always Asian. And courteous.

The Prague 'pizzeria' of today is filled to the rafters with Czechs, and they bring all of their hideous, flavorless, peasant food habits to the table. Sadly, this includes pizza with saltine cracker crust, ketchup for sauce, lumpy Czech cheese in thin, see-through strands, and almost no flavor whatsoever.

You would think that with thousands of pizza joints in Prague, some of them could carry garlic, right? They've got garlic in Czech restaurants; it ain't a stranger.

Czech Food: Bring a Guide Dog for the Bland

I remember a Frenchman on a Prague expats forum wrote “When searching for Czech food, bring a guide dog for the bland.” It was his forum signature and it appeared on every post. Maybe he was trying to tell us something. Every time he posted. Fair enough; the French found a way to make snails edible.

But Frawnchy wasn't far from the truth. Czechs have very bland taste, and rarely use any form of spices or herbs stronger than oregano. Ketchup is too spicy for them, as the markets offer 'mild ketchup' for those who cry like babies at the thought of normal ketchup. So it is quite normal for the Czech interpretation of pizza to include sauce without any herbs, and pizza without garlic. Without oregano, basil, and garlic (and any decent amount of cheese), you might as well take that Czech pizza and throw it like a Frisbee. If only because it tastes like one.

Paltry Prague Pizza

I've given up on finding 'American style' pizza in Prague (No. American pizza is not just thicker crust. It's thicker cheese, thicker toppings, and thicker flavor). Now I search for the hole-in-the-wall joint where some pizza chef spent time not only in Naples but also in New York or any other American city. Sure, Naples may have invented pizza, but it was definitely not perfected there. Its thin, burnt cracker crust, paltry toppings, and weird greens on top ain't cutting it in my Wide World, friends.

But one thing Italy has in buckets: garlic. You can smell the pungent smell of garlic wafting out of the window of every single restaurant in any Italian city you visit. So why, for the love of all creatures great and small, do the Czechs forget to offer garlic on their pizza?

Some Prague pizzerias offer one pizza with garlic on it. And there ain't much more on there. Or worse, the damn thing has eggs on it. Or corn. MUH?!?

Garlic isn't for everyone, granted. But it should be offered as an added topping, like the dreaded anchovies in American pizzerias (Which baffles me. Nobody eats anchovies). Just in case some weirdo wants pizza with flavor. Garlic costs nothing and keeps well. Just sayin', Czechies. Lose the corn, the tuna, and the eggs. That shit don't belong anywhere NEAR a pizza. Get garlic, bitches.

Ironically, Czechs Eat Garlic

What makes the Great Garlic Gastronomy Conundrum even worse is that Czechs are no strangers to garlic. In fact, two of their most famous dishes have enough garlic in them to vaporize a village of vampires.

Topinky: fried slices of bread with 3 or 4 RAW garlic cloves on the side. You take the raw garlic and scrape it across the surface of the fried bread until it becomes a smooth paste. Then you eat that stuff, shake your head, and yell YOWZA!

Bramboráčky: (potato pancakes): grated potatoes with garlic, green herbs, flour, and eggs, fried in a shallow pan. These Czech staples often come so loaded with garlic that you reek of it for days. Delicious!

Too Complicated for Czech Palates

Czech food is simple food, handed down for generations. It's hearty, heavy, and hefty enough to fill your belly on a cold winter day. Maybe the flavor fell out of the food during communism, when gray banality ruled the day, and thin gruel was paradise to the poor bastards. I dunno, I wasn't there.

Perhaps having a combination of pizza crust, rich, flavorful sauce, gooey mozzarella cheese, and a fistful of fancy toppings is a bridge to far in Prague. It's quite rare to find a Czech pizza with more than 2 toppings on it. A typical pizza will have mushrooms and ham, or ham and olives, or ham, ham, and ham (they dig on swine). Perhaps adding such tongue teasers as garlic and oregano to their pizzas would cause their dumpling-shaped heads to explode.

Big Sir's Favorite Prague Pizzas

Johnny's Pizza: Boo-Yow!

If I could combine the fantastic crust of 360Pizza with the brilliant pies of Johnny Pizza Bar, I would be in heaven. Johnny offers garlic on several of their pizzas and you can always add garlic to any pizza. Sadly, 360Pizza offers no garlic on the menu. Which is a shame, because that pizza dough is the closest thing to American style pizza dough in Prague: crispy on the outside, soft, fluffy, and chewy on the inside. It's the only pizza crust I actually eat all the way to the edges. I usually throw the Czech dried-out-cracker pizza crust to the damn pigeons.

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If you have any Prague pizza perfection to share with me, let me know. Even if garlic ain't your thang, let me know about the place, the pie, the toppings, and the dough ray me, muchachos. Don't worry if the place has no garlic on the menu. I will soon start wearing garlic garlands around my neck like jewelry just in case I need to break off a clove or two and flavor the shizzle out of my next pizza.

I will scrape that raw garlic right then and there on the thin, crispy crust. Don't make me. I'll do it.