All Hail The Mighty Goat!

Beer Guzzling With Bleating Goats at a Czech Village Brewery.

Each year in June, thousands descend upon the otherwise quiet village of Velke Popovice to drink beer with live goats. Den Kozla or Goat Day, or Day of the Goat (which sounds decidedly more wicked), is a yearly celebration at the Velkopopovicky Kozel Brewery. Most beer labels in Europe have a dead king or an overweight noble dandy on the label. In the U.S., all the beer containers are as boring and bland as the beer inside. But not my favorite Czech beer, no sir. It's got a goat. A big, hairy bastard with twisted horns holding a foaming beer glass.

Spinning for beer and fabulous goat swag

I don't have too many rules binding my life, but I have beer rules: 1) in Germany, drink beer with a monk on the label, 2) in Czech, drink beer with a big wicked goat on the label.

Maybe I love the Mighty Goat because he reminds me of a simpler time when my religious parents forbade me to listen to hard rock music, so naturally I went to the music store (when they had those) and stared at the heaviest metal albums I could find. And they all enticed me with their red and black covers blazing with pentagrams and goats. Apparently, the goat represents the devil.
Hell yeah!

Den Kozla: Ancient Pagan Ritual of Beer Swilling

What are they feeding those goats?

Normally the wife likes to drag my lazy ass out to the woods to climb giant, slippery rocks or to get attacked by ticks and mosquitoes. If I don't feel up to plummeting to my death or contracting lime disease, I am always free to suggest a cultural event worthy of a discriminating European. Like a gypsy stomp. That's about as discriminating as it gets here in Czechia. But I tend to avoid organized hate rituals like we have in the States (tiki torch Nazis ferfuckssakes), so we just have to conjure up some culture from dead composers and artists in dull mausoleums.

Until the dawning of the Day of The Goat. Then we pagans don black robes, gather in a field, tie up a goat, dance around the writhing, bleating beast, rip its heart out, and then summon hellfire. Or we drink heinous amounts of goaty beer and suck down more sausages than a train station hooker. One of those. Either way, the shadowy figure of Pan smiles on us.

Despite its sketchy image in dark music, the Den Kozla goat fest rages on every year, and I've now been to three out of 26 of them. They never cater to metal heads by making a goat shirt with a pentagram, nor do they play headbanger music. It would certainly draw a crowd, as evidenced by the metric fuckton of mullets in this country. They would still make buttloads of money on beer. But maybe having a bunch of hopped-up headbangers chasing the goats around with meat cleavers is a bit awkward. So Czech folk music will have to do. And it does.

Helter Skelter in a Summer Swelter

It was a blazing June day at the brewery and shade was scarce. As an industrial building complex made up of mostly brick buildings and cement roads, shady spots were at a premium. People were crowding into small swathes of shade cast on metal fences along sloping lawns. Since I left my stained, rain-soaked old straw hat on Palatine Hill in Rome last month, I would need new head gear, pronto. The alternative is a hat-less fat dude drinking beer for hours in the hot sun. What could go wrong?

The Kozel Times

I grabbed my Den Kozla straw hat for 99 crowns. I would not bake my noodle in the sun and suffer heat stroke after all. What a bargain. I bought a Den Kozla shirt as well, not because I worship the Mighty Goat, not because I revere goat beer as the nectar of the gods, but because they actually had a shirt in my wide-ass size. I usually ask for size WBJ (Wide Body Jetsetter) or TFA (Tall Fat American). I am usually disappointed. But not this year! I found the only 3XL t-shirt within 500 kilometers. Maybe some genius finally figured out that some of the types of dudes who inhale beer and sausages all day might be a bit on the big side. Or maybe they've always had fat bastardware in my size, but all the fat dudes show up at 8 AM to buy them all. Which reminds me of yet another beer rule: I never drink beer at 8 AM unless I happen to have stayed up all night long drinking beer til 8 AM.

Coke or goat dark, kid?

As the day sweltered on, the cold refreshing goat beer was all that stood between the crowd and dehydration. I was right at that moment of the magical balancing act between the dehydrating effects of sweating in the sun and the diuretic effects of alcohol. One would think that after 6 or 7 beers, one would need to go to the toilet. One would be wrong. My plan was to slowly replace the liquid in my sweat glands with golden goat beer. After hours of walking around in a foggy haze of heat and alcohol, I stumbled into a cold stream of water spewing forth from the side of a fire truck. Children were splashing and running through the water jets chasing rainbows in the mist. It was suddenly like Harlem in the 1960s. With much better beer.

Den Kozla: Refreshingly Hipster Free

Brother from another mother

Nowadays you can't swing a dead cat around for more than five minutes before it sticks in some hipster's greasy beard. The beardos tend to congregate and coagulate around street food stands, 'farmers' markets serving up nothing ever eaten by farmers, and any event promising overpriced craft beer. But the Mighty Goat is keepin' it real: only three kinds of beer are tapped at Den Kozla: goaty original, goatesque amber, and goatacious dark. Served cold and cheap. One of the best things about Goat Day is that each year they release a new goat beer which is only served at the GoatFest. Once it has been tapped, drunk, and pissed into the bushes, it will never be seen or heard from again. This year's Goat Special was called Mistrův ležák (master lager), a pleasing amber lager with a crisp start and a smooth, refreshing finish.

No kale or gluten free hipster hovno here; the food stands are 100% Czech: pots of goulash swinging on chains over fire, deep friers cranking out massive potato pancakes, and enough klobasa to choke a dozen donkeys. You will not find one single avocado smashed on toast.

OGG: old gangsta goat

But you will find plenty of live goats and costumed goat people at Den Kozla. You can also visit Olda the Goat, the official mascot of the Velkopopovicky Kozel Brewery. He stands behind a fence under a shade tree waiting for your selfies while munching grass. This year, Olda seemed much older. He had shed some of the wild, curly goat hair of his youth, his goaty goatee was looking a bit gray, and he didn't seem like he could hold a foaming beer stein like he used to. I feel ya, OG.

We middle-aged old goats gotta stick together. I 'kid' you not.

Tales From the Food Crypt

Wading Through Aisles of Expired Food in Prague

If you're just passing through Prague, you won't notice them. They're harmless looking grocery stores that you would easily pass in favor of supermarket chains like Albert, Tesco, Kaufland, or Lidl. You would be correct in your passing. But I'm here to tell you how the other half lives.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the levne potraviny, aka 'cheap groceries.' These places are just chock full of expired goods and bads from rich Western countries. And people shop there. And more of these stores open every year. People are too poor to care, so they shop, they buy, and they suck down more old sausages than a train station hooker.

Top 10 Least Successful Food Chains

I'll never forget one of Letterman's Top 10 Lists, which featured names of the least successful food chains. But I could only remember 'Food Crypt' and 'Risky's.' So I Googled the motherhumper:

Top 10 Least Popular Supermarket Chains - May 3, 1990

10. Pick 'n' Lick

9. Larva Town

8. Food Crypt

7. Risky's

6. Price Hiker

5. Rex Reed's Grocery Rodeo

4. The Expiration Date Grab Bag

3. I'm-Not-Wearing Pantry

2. Hitler's

1. Bag This!

Since Germany and Austria border Czechia, it's probably too soon to open a Hitler's. But The Expiration Date Grab Bag is open for business, and it's turning a brisk trade.

Prague Suburbs: Industrial Wastelands and Soviet Housing Blocks

It wasn't always this way. In Commie Times, Czechs huddled in their cozy concrete high rise flats with fizzling sparks of socialist joy warming their cold hearts. There were exactly two shops: the one where they bought all of the usual Czech sludge: goulash, dumplings and cabbage, and the one where they stood in line for hours to get oranges, bananas, or any other fruits from warm countries outside of the frozen Eastern Bloc.

I've lived in a few panelaky, or gray, Commie housing blocks. They crush the soul, truly they do. Now I live in an old 1900s, pre-Soviet building in an industrial suburb, as usual, not because I can't afford to live in the tourist-besieged Prague center, but because I like cheap rent. And quiet nights. I live in Praha-Liben, a downtrodden neighborhood that is slowly looking up. My Libenese neighbors are mostly poor working class folks living in a few old, crumbling buildings.

The sprawling O2 Arena and mall complex are at the end of our street, and in between us and mass consumerism are some newfangled apartments for a mish-mash of various nouveau-riche slobs from Slobovia, One street over, there's a few ubytovna buildings, or dorm housing for Ukie laborers. And there's your garden variety poor Czechs who pine away for the good old days of Communism in their absinthe dementia.

The Expiration Date Grab Bag

Czechia has long been a dumping ground for inferior goods from richer countries. What's worse, the exact same German brand of juice you buy in Germany for 1 EUR is 2 EUR here. And it's worse quality. And Czechs make half what the Germans make. But one thing is certain: they don't throw away their food here like in Western countries. They just drop the prices.

So we go to the Food Crypt or the Risky's. There are at least three in our neighborhood, which tells you all you need to know. I buy expired food and I'm not ashamed. It's radically reduced in price, and mostly familiar Western brands. So what if the box of Kellogg's Special K breakfast bars are a few months after the sell-by date? There are enough preservatives in those little chocolate bastards to embalm an elephant. And they cost a quarter per box, rather than 1 EUR. Now THAT's economy. I save money on both food and embalming.

Not all foods are expired. Some are past their 'best by' date, and some poor products are just victims of bad marketing or differences in consumer tastes. Central Europeans hate spicy things, so there is a dearth of spicy sauces, Cajun whatsits, South American marinades, and exotic BBQ sauces at discount prices. I buy them all. My wife thinks I'm mad. But no two BBQ sessions taste the same, I tell ya.

Shopping With Various Slobs From Slobovia

The Food Crypt is full of a fine cast of characters. We don't have Walmart. We have the Food Crypt. I can show up in my worst clothes, unwashed, hair sticking up, tartar sauce on the crotch of my trousers, and nobody bats an eye. The other day I entered the Crypt. A hunched homunculus with a walrus mustache, coke bottle glasses, greasy ball cap, and a fake gold chain crossed my path. He was wearing a faded t-shirt with English lettering (a perennial favorite here): Czech Made Man. It was almost like the cover of that Fat Boy Slim album. He and the usual assortment of gypsies, tramps and thieves were wandering the aisles. I don't know which of those categories I fall into, but I'm leaning toward the tramp.

Sucking Down More Klobasa Than a Train Station Hooker

I pick up a box of my favorite expired breakfast embalming bars, skip over the expired chips and dips, and head to the meat section. There is always a human clog in the meat section at all times. Not just because Czechs are big meat eaters (heh), but because there is an actual law the prevents the selling of expired meats in the EU. So there I head, looking for discount salamis thrown over from Germany. My favorite brand of smoked salami is Houdek, a Czech-sounding-yet-made-in-Germany brand. They're extra smokey and delicious. And the meat is of a higher quality than the usual tubes of lips and assholes you buy in Czechia.

Score! There, wedged in between the slab of greasy bacon and the hunk of unidentified meat! Houdek kabanos, with cheese! My favorite! Whoa, mama, I could hardly find these babies in Germany, they were so popular. There they were 2 EUR for a pack of two. Here they are only 75 cents per package. So I bought almost ALL OF THEM. Why not? They don't expire til the end of November, and I have a big freezer.

So I swaggered out of the Food Crypt with an armload of German salami and a 3-liter box of Italian wine. All for less than a tenner. I don't plan to live on this diet for too long. And if it keeps up, I probably won't. But I am a Wide Body Jetsetter living LARGE in Post-Communist Czechia. And a Czigga's gotta eat.

"Get Your Old School Cartoon Bombs Here!"

Spontaneous Spa Town

As firmly established in my last post, my wife loves to drag my lardy ass out of the house randomly and for no purpose other than to watch me sweat, squeal, bitch and moan. Of course she says she is doing it out of love—and to make me do healthy things in nature to keep me from having a heart attack. But the very nature of these healthy things usually places me at high risk of a heart attack. So it goes.

On this particular day, the usual bribery was in place: I promised to get my ass out of the house, walk medium-to-great distances for no reason, then I get to have fried cheese and beer in a village pub as a reward for my efforts (if I'm not killed in the process). I had a brilliant plan: take a 15 minute tram ride over to Hloubětin Chateau (like we did last week), get pics from the opposite side (for better lighting), and to retire to the Old Czech Pub in the 18^th century house just down the road. It was easy peasy, no major hiking, and minimum effort for maximum reward. I'm just going to cut to the chase: gray skies. Bad lighting. No photography possible. No chateau walk. No old pub possible as a bribe/reward. Fuck.

Plan B: Is This Where I Get Cheated Out of My Fried Cheese?

Then she pulled a plan out of the spontaneity hat: 'Let's go to Poděbrady! It's got spas and springs and blah blah blah.' I tuned out due to a short attention span. But since the train trip was an hour each way, there would be no chance for her to finagle her way out of the promised land of beer and fried cheese.

Poděbrady, like all Euro-towns, has a history. And it is either unintelligible or unpronounceable. The hipsters and trustafarians living near Jiřiho z Poděbrad metro station can only call it JZP. But Jiři is George and he is from Poděbrady. But he was also the King of Bohemia in the 1400s, a Hussite (Protestants Against Catholics, or PAC man, if they'd had acronyms back then). You've gotta give Prague credit for fighting the Catholic power: Jan Hus (Statue and Church in the Old Town Square) and Jan Žižka (One-eyed general and Catholic-ass-kicking patron of the whole Žižkov quarter of Prague). The Two Honzas (nickname for Jan) won many battles, but lost the war. Catholicism ended up dominating most of Europe, but the Czechs settled on good-old-fashioned Atheism as a final result. A most excellent tie breaker if I do say so myself.

Healing Waters and Horny Old Folks

Poděbrady is also a spa town. Bohemia has many of these, the more famous of which lie in the mountain range between Germany and Czech (Karlovy Vary, Mariánské Lázně, etc.). If you have the geographic blessing of spring water for drinking and soaking, some of the best beer in the world, and a history of treating heart patients—well, it was fate that I would have to go there. If I had a heart attack during the hours of walking, I would be in the right place.

As we walked down the long promenade-slash-park from the train station to the Old Town, several fountains enclosed in glass greeted our gaze. Sadly, most of the fountains were as dried up as the old ladies milling about aimlessly. Then my wife said something really frightening: 'This place is famous for old people getting laid.'

'UGH! Why would you say that? Now I can't UNHEAR that!'

Then she proceeded with the tired old 'you prude' argument, saying it was perfectly normal for crotchety old farts to chase wizened old prunes around in the sauna. Just because they 'can' do something, doesn't mean that I need to hear about it. I blame the damn Viagra. It's like Bill Maher said regarding boner pills for old folks: 'Grandpa! Leave that old bag of bones in the next room alone!'

So with the awful imagery of fragile fossils fornicating, we continued on until my first requisite stop, the old castle. To many Americans, the European castle is a fantastic remnant of a steel-and-stone history, and a reminder that America isn't old enough to have castles. So I've spent the last 20-odd years drifting around Europe catching castle pics and stomping around stone ruins. My full imagination employs itself: high stone walls with tiny windows strong against the barbaric hordes, lofty round towers seemingly made with the sole purpose of keeping the peasants out of the princess's knickers, and cold, hard halls filled with the smell of roasting meat and the sounds of heavy mugs of beers clunking together with HOORAHS and hey...

...Is that a pub over in the castle courtyard?! Yes! Maybe they'll have swarthy barmaids swinging swine clubs amid drunken lords. Or at least have a slab of sýr for me to slide down my gullet. Sadly, it was only a cafe. But still. A cafe with a view to a 12 century castle is better than a sharp lance in the eye. For some strange reason, my babe didn't like the castle. It was too square and well, too military for her. She prefers the quaint, frilly castles of the renaissance and baroque periods. In the 12 century, castles were built for function more than form. But we wouldn't get to find out what lies in the hallowed halls of Poděbrady Castle on that day. All castles close to the public at the end of October. Which is a pity. Just when the cold and wet air whips clouds into battle formation, filling the skies with castle clouds (my phrase for heavy, black/gray puffy clouds which add to the mystery of a castle picture), they close the fuckers.

A Dram of Whiskey, A Jug of Water, A Slab of Cheese

Well, at least I got a warm whiskey in the cafe to bolster my spirits. Then we finally found a working tap which dispenses the famous Poděbrady mineral water, right there in the castle courtyard below the maiden's tower. After filling up a jug with the water (which tastes of salt and iron), we slowly wended our way back through town, stopping for my (YES!!!) smaženy sýr, hranolky and tartarka, washed down with local beer.

Carrying a backpack with a tall jug of water in it can be challenging, and the jug often flopped over in my backpack, requiring my wife to get into the pack and wrestle it back into shape, muttering under her breath, “Damn thing handles like a bag of dicks.”

I am so glad I took the time to teach her my favorite redneck aphorisms.

Photos by Gabriela Sarževská

The Swine Club

A Blunt Instrument Best Used in Hand-to-Hand Combat

The first rule of The Swine Club is: you tell EVERYONE on the internet about The Swine Club. You just need to know the secret code: Pečene vepřove koleno (petch-eh-nee veh-przhovee koh-leh-no). This is Czech for 'roasted pork knee.' It is a massive chunk of swine flesh served on the bone, au naturel, on a board with a knife sticking out of it. Czechs don't merely cook their piggies. They get medieval on their knees.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

I've had several friends ask me for the code when they were about to visit Prague for the first time. It usually went something like this: 'Where can I get that piggy-thingamajig on a piece of wood?' To which I replied, 'Oh, you mean the large, greasy piece of roasted swine that you pick up by the bone and use to club uppity vegans into submission? That would be the koleno. And you are in luck, my carnivorous friend: you can get that almost EVERYWHERE in Prague (or at least everywhere vegans fear to tread).

You might be thinking, 'Why would I want that? I'm happy with fast food chains and safe food options.' I'll tell you why. Remember the Medieval World scene from The Cable Guy? Piles of meat on the plates, scraps and bones on the floor. And jousting. And a disenfranchised chick saying 'I'm your serving wench, Julie.' You know you'd pork that.

Der Schweinenhammer

Bohemian and Bavarian cuisine (if you can call a diet based largely on beer and pork 'cuisine.' It is also known as Muslimsbane) are similar. In Bavaria (Munich und freunds) they call my dear Pork Mallet Schweinshaxe, also badly translated as 'pork knuckle.' Who the fuck puts knuckles on pigs? Anywho, I prefer the more barbaric word der schweinenhammer, or pork hammer. Don't worry. You won't have to remember that one because it's not on the menu. I just made that shit up because it sounds cool. That's what we wordsmiths do. We hammer words until they squeal. Sometimes we kneecap the bitches, and occasionally, but only rarely, we get medieval on their asses.

But whether we call it koleno or haxe, they both have the same effect on you. After you eat it you will feel like you've been pounded in the stomach by the red hot hammer of a medieval blacksmith. This feeling is what your humble culinary servant WBJ calls The Hammer of the Gods. It hurts. It hurts so good.

Baskets of Bread and Other Useless Shit

The Pig Cudgel usually comes with mustard, sauerkraut, horseradish and a huge basket of bread. Don't fill up on the bread. Trust me (think: stomach hammer). This beast is 1 kilo of meat, fat, grease and bone. Use the bread sparingly, just to absorb the greasy blow of the swine club, use the mustard and horseradish as an antiseptic balm for the roast beast, and tip the server. He/she just might know the Heimlich maneuver.

You can find koleno in most tradtional Czech hospodas (pubs) or restaurace (guess). Make sure it's served on the board with the knife. You will feel like either a viking warrior or a klingon. Unless you're a vegan. Then you'll feel about as useless as an asshole on an elbow. Or a knee. Or a knuckle...

Smažený Sýr!

One Wide Man's Comfort Food

Fried Cheese. It's the stuff of life. Or at least the stuff of my life in the Czech Republic. Everyone needs to find their vice, their relief from the pain and suffering of being mortal. Some choose heroin, meth, crack, hoes, or heroin-addicted, methed-up crack hoes. I do not judge. For me, my vices are The Beer and The Sýr. I guess I would call fried cheese my comfort food. But that's not saying enough. It doesn't 'comfort' me in the way that macaroni and cheese comforts a white trash stoner. My smažený sýr (pronounced smazheny seer) experience is more like trying to stuff a slab of greasy cheese into a hollowed out knitting needle and jam that bitch into my tongue. I'm almost ready to seek help.

Tourists and travelers alike want to know what Real Czech Food is. Yeah, you can have gulash, but the Hungrarians already had that, and sure, you can score some chunks of roasted meat and sauerkraut, but the Germans probably invented that shit as well. If you want something so real, so tasty and so gawdamn decadent that Czechs themselves swear it's the FIRST thing they eat after returning from abroad—it's the fried cheese.

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská

'But we already have that,' a skeptical American friend said. 'Au contrare, mon frer,' I corrected, you have your mozzarella sticks. In Czechia, they take 2 fuckin' SLABS of cheese, batter the beJAYzus out of 'em, then chuck 'em in the deep fryer right next to your order of fries, then throw it all on a plate with tartar sauce. Occasionally there are small strips of sad sauerkraut or shredded parsley on the side as a garnish. You can safely ignore that shit and dive right on into your hunka hunka burnin' cheese.

Fried cheese is like sex: the worst fried cheese I have EVER had...wasn't bad. It was served in a train station, lukewarm, rigid, rushed and served with no enthusiasm by an old woman who clearly hated her job. And then there was the fried cheese...

The Smažený Sýr Zine

Back before weblogs became blogs, feckless writers who couldn't be published in magazines wrote zines. These poorly crafted tomes were oftentimes the alternative mini manifestos of whatever subcultures were popular before the iphones made zombies of our chilluns. I wrote one of those things, hand printed in pen and ink, to be released in Prague in the late 90s in the height of the (sticking fingers in air in ridiculous quote signs) Prague Literati (unfingerquote). There was just a metric fuckton of American wannabe writers (and Brits as well) living in Prague, sucking up the fried cheese, cheap beer and doe-eyed babes like a whale sucks brine through baleen.

My Smažený Sýr Zine was subtitled 'A Toxic By-product of the Prague Literati.' At the time, too many poetry readings were being given by thin, twitching vegans under the banner of Beefstew. When I first arrived in Prague in '97 with 400 bux in my pocket, I was also a misguided vegetarian. My last girlfriend in the States had warped my brain and stomach into a new diet without meat. Since then I have discovered that the vegetarian diet doesn't work for large men. All the tofu in the world won't fill the protein void. And kale? Gofuckyerself.

I chose cheese. It was in a restaurant near Karlovo namesti where my cheese cherry was first heated, stretched, and broken. The joint was full of smoke and beer and just the kind of apathy that made me comfortable in my own skin. I took the unintelligible Czech menu from the unintelligible Czech waiter and pointed to the plate of the man at the next table The man was cutting into a fried, breaded pillow of something which oozed onto a pile of french fries. 'Is that vegetarian?' I asked. 'It's cheese,' he replied. Then he brought me one.

And with that, Craig Robinson was in love.

I needed to tell the people. They needed to know my love. I wanted to start cults of fried cheeseheads which would put the Green Bay Packers fans to shame. And I wanted to smear the sýr all over the local newspapers and shout cheesy yelps of joy from the rooftops.

The Smažený Sýr Zine project withered in the udder. I had hand printed one—all 4 pages of it (double sided A4, folded in half) and all I needed was the money for a copy machine. I would print HUNDREDS of these cheesy little bastards, change the global diet, and jam my middle finger up the collective noses of all those wannabe 'Prague Writers.' Maybe the project died because a good friend of mine read it and called me a fucking idiot. Or maybe it died because the world wasn't ready to embrace a radical deep fried cheese diet, one which would throw the Earth off its axis from our sheer heavy human MASS. Or maybe I didn't have fifty bux to print the damn thing. You and I will never know. Oh, the bullet we dodged.

In the meantime, I attend cheese church religiously, looking for my sacred cow. Many times I have thought about writing reviews about where to get the best fried cheese in Prague, but the lack of culinary consistency in this country makes me think the cooks are on a rotating prison work furlough. You can get a perfect fried cheese in a pub one day, and the next—total fucking hockey puck. There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason.

Cheese Spotting

As mentioned before, bad fried cheese and bad sex are still better than a sharp stick in the eye, so fried cheese reviews might seem pointless with such a non-gourmet food. But after a few thousand pounds of cheesy goodness washed down with cheap, delicious Czech beer, I can offer the following fried cheese guidelines with absolute authority.

1. The cheese must be at least 40% fat in order to melt well. Otherwise you are eating a rubber hockey puck. You can often get 3 or 4 diffferent types of fried cheese: the basic eidam, the snooty camembert, and the risky blue cheese. My staple is the eidam (eidamer in Deutsch).
   
   
2. The fries must be cut thick and fresh on the premises and fried to a golden perfection. Anything less is just frozen fast food fries. The better joints even let you choose the style of your fries: traditional, 'American' (wedges) or boiled potatoes. But don't order the latter unless you are a starving Russian author just released from prison.
   
   
3. The tartar sauce must come in a mini gravy boat with lots of little green herbal chunks. If they try to fob off a package of tartar sauce, you can feel free to deduct that shit from the tip. Cheap-ass-bitch tax, I call it.
   
   
   
4. If a menu has fried cheese and french fries on it, but doesn't include the tartar sauce in the price, keep walking. These cheap ass Czech fucks like to charge for condiments. Hell, they even charge 50 cents for each ketchup packet in McDonald's or any other American fast food joint. The nerve.
   
   
5. Hit the lunch menus between 11am and 2pm. It's a few bucks cheaper. Some of the more enlightened restaurants extend those golden, cheesy hours to 3 or 4pm, knowing that some of us don't get up at 5am, work in factories, and eat lunch at 11am.
   
   
6. After all I've said, you still might be tempted to get one of the meat dishes from the lunch menu. Don't do it, I'm telling you. Unless you like eating three tiny, outdated, discount market chunks of stringy, fatty, grisly, dried out meat served in a sea of universal brown sauce and a metric fuckton of dried out dumpling paperweights. Trust me, life is too short for that shit.

The blogger is chock full of fried cheese as he posts this. But he still needs to ask you:

Where did you have your best fried cheese in Prague? 
Where can I find that tasty shit?

Photo by Gabriela Sarževská