A confession: I’m crazy about hamburgers and classic sandos. Back home — by which I mean the USA — I generally avoided diner food, usually seeking out Ethiopian, Cambodian or even (God forbid) central European cuisine instead.
But a decade of living out of the country can change you. Now I have a club sandwich just about as often as I can. And if a Michelin-starred restaurant sees fit to list a burger on the menu, I’m probably going to take it out for a spin.
So when I saw that Prague’s new Siddharta Café offered a club sandwich, lunch was settled.
Siddharta Café is part of the new Buddha Bar complex in Old Town, home to the tenth Buddha Bar — in the sense of a bar and restaurant — in the world. More importantly, it’s also the very first Buddha Bar Hotel, luxury lodgings with the same pan-Asian decorative exoticism as the bar chain. I’ll be writing about the hotel later. For now, after taking a brief tour, I can tell you that it is an extremely stylish place. “Sexy” may be overused as a descriptor for boutique hotels, but the place does have a highly charged, palpably lascivious atmosphere.
Meaning yes. If you stay here, you will get laid.
Your dating chances are probably pretty good at the Siddharta Café, too. Functioning as the hotel lounge and day bar, it occupies a voluminous space with 10-meter sculpted ceilings and a live DJ at almost all times. One wall has dozens of Buddha statues in multicolored cubbyholes climbing to the ceiling. Praguers from a generation back might remember the space as the Marquis de Sade, an infamous den of iniquity and questionable structural integrity. (It never collapsed, though apparently it came close several times.) The space was said to have housed a bordello a century or so ago, which lent it an air of old Prague lustiness.
Though the grand opening is not for a couple of days, the hotel has been taking bookings since last week; at the Siddharta Café, they’ve been serving food and charging people money for it for a while. Today they had a two-course business lunch for 375 Kč, the fairly pricey local equivalent of $18, or three courses for 500 Kč, or $24. Among the starter options was a Czech bramboračka, meaning potato soup. I passed, ordering the Caesar salad with prawns instead.
No photo. Instead, imagine romaine lettuce leaves of the kind used to illustrate a gardening book from Dorling Kindersley: impossibly perfect, crisply green blades topped with big knife-flicks of Parmesan cheese. Atop those, a good half dozen shelled shrimp which had been pan-seared in butter. Standard-issue croutons mixed in with a garlicky, mustard-sharp dressing which gave way to more than a touch of anchovy in the finish. (Can a salad dressing have a finish? This one did.)
That was better than okay. And a few minutes later the sangwich showed up.
The fries looked better than they tasted: there was not enough crispiness to the outside, and the potato flesh was surprisingly sweet. They were just on the slick side of oily, several steps before “unacceptably greasy,” but still far from the Platonic ideal. The sandwich, however, was just about perfect: four crustless triangles of toasted white bread, lavished with mayo and layered with iceberg lettuce, thick-cut turkey breast, more toast, bacon, boiled egg and sliced tomatoes. The bacon occupied the sweet spot between breakfast strips and prosciutto. The boiled egg was exactly à point, an easy thing to mess up, and the turkey breast was rich and juicy. It was, as far as club sandwiches go, excellent.
This isn’t meant to be an entire review, just the first word on an interesting new café in Prague. But in a way, it says a lot about the place: they’re barely open, they still have people working on the wiring and finishing up the design, they haven’t even stocked the hotel shop, and yet the kitchen can crank out a pitch-perfect interpretation of a classic. For many restaurants, that’s not an easy task even under perfect conditions. It bodes well for the future.
A final observation: if I’m not mistaken, I was seated just across from Buddha Bar founder Raymond Visan, who seemed to be going over the final planning details for the hotel, occasionally giving instructions about the café and what needed to be fixed or changed. He looked tired, but he also looked satisfied.
