Restaurant Recs Needed - Vienna, Prague, Budapest

All,

My parents are going on a trip that will include Vienna, Prague and Budapest. Does anyone have restaurant recommendations?

Thanks,
Kevin

Rent an apartment in Prague and cook for yourself, the local restaurants don’t do the ingredients justice. In Budapest my favorite restaurant is Fulemule – absolutely fantastic goose dishes. I haven’t spent a ton of time in Vienna but I had a surprisingly good meal at Plachutta when I was there last fall. Vienna has lots of really good Italian restaurants if you get tired of local cuisine.

I agree that the restaurant cooking in Prague is terrible.

Vienna is the opposite; many great restaurants. Some of our favorites can be found on this thread: Hotels, Restaurants in Vienna - Travel, Wine Tourism, and Restaurants Forum - WineBerserkers

We’re thinking about another (4th) visit to Vienna in June. Beautiful city. Great, influential art, music, and very fine dining at many price points.

Thank you

In Vienna, if money is no object, Steirereck is fantastic. Very expensive, particularly if the Euro keeps climbing, but worth every penny.

Totally agree - one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

We also loved Walter Bauer.

And on the casual end of the spectrum, I would recommend Weilbel’s Wirtshaus - really good food and a great, well priced wine list.

For Vienna, check out Anthony Bourdain’s new season program on Travel Channel. Was shown last week with usually lots of repeats to follow and highlights on web-site. Sorry I had not seen this before I went to Vienna. Best meal I had in 3 cities above was breakfast buffet in our hotel in Prague. Dinners ok, but couldn’t believe number of items restaurants were out of in Budapest. In Prague, best meal was pilsner beer and ribs at a bar just off the old square. Very good, but not what you would call Haut Cuisine.

Going to Prague in a few weeks.

Does anybody have anything in the way of recomendations that don’t involve me cooking for myself? Any good place to get real jitrinice?

Two of the better meals we had in Prague:

Coda Restaurant in the Aria Hotel:
http://www.codarestaurant.cz/index.php/en

La Degustation Bohême Bourgeoise:

Our best meals in Prague this week were at U Modré Kachnicky and U Modré Ruze. They’re both very traditional Czech restaurants, nothing modern about them. Kachnicky has some decent Czech wines. Our waiter guided us well in the wine dept.

In Vienna last weekend we had an awesome meal at Zum Weissen Rauchfangkehrer. What a great Austrian wine list they have, and at very reasonable prices. When the server realized we were more than into wines, he started bringing over tastes of various brandies and digestifs after the meal. It was a lot of fun.

Another good place in Vienna is Artner Franziskanerplatz. We ate outdoors there on a beautiful evening. The wine list isn’t as deep as Rauchfangkehrer, but it’s still decent. Ask for Ralph the waiter, he’s a lot of fun and a real pro at service.

Has anybody eaten at any of the following?:
Artisan
V Zatisi
Cafe Phenix

Brian,
We ate at V Zátiší several years ago. It was our best meal in Prague, which isn’t saying much, as I think the dining in Prague is lousy. But V Zátiší was pretty good. Not Vienna good, but Prague good.

I remember our evening there specifically, as we sat next to (then with) some friends who we hadn’t seen in a couple of years. Pretty fun running into friends in Prague.

Cool. Thank you, Mark.

My wife and I were in Prague about a week ago for three nights and ate at the following:

Cafe Phenix - We were interested based on TripAdvisor reviews, walked by earlier in the day and made a reservation for that evening. We had their special truffle menu - my main was beef cheeks (pork cheeks was on the menu, but all they could get were beef) and it was excellent - and several Czech wines - a sparkler and a white by the glass and a bottle of red - Frankovka - which were all tasty. Total cost was about US $130 …

Cafe de Paris - Again, based on TripAdvisor. Even though we weren’t in Paris, steak frites sounded really good to me. They did a really good job here and the quantity was huge. We had glasses of bubbly and a bottle of '09 Cote du Rhone and were out the door for about US $85.

U Modré Kachnicky - I knew Ed Kurtzman had recently been in Prague (see his post above) and I had asked him for his suggestions, of which this was one. We had their seasonal menu, which focused on asparagus and strawberries. My main was a duck breast with a stawberry sauce and my wife had roast wild boar. In general, it was excellent, although I found the strawberry sauce a little too sweet for the duck. The service was outstanding and the wine suggestions - glassses of a sparkler and a white and a bottle of Czech Merlot - were very nice. Cost was about US $200.

While all very different in style, I’d return to all three of these and highly recommend them.

Thank you, Scott.

Kevin,
In Budapest, the Tigris Restaurant has great food and a great wine list.
Best foie gras I have ever tasted.
http://www.tigrisrestaurant.hu/english

My brother lived in Prague for a year or two while he was working for Boeing. We went to a few restaurants that were considered good for Prague and all I can say is that they wouldn’t survive in Napa considering the quality of their food. We still enjoyed ourselves because of the setting and the different culture.

It still does. The foie gras four ways is ridiculous.

This is an old thread. On another Budapest thread, I mentioned my subpar experience at Tigris, low quality stringy fois. September 2017.

The foie gras last night was excellent. The sous vide duck main wasn’t to my liking, but then I’m not a fan of sous vide animal protein.