A Restaurant Guide to Brno in the Czech Republic

Brno, the second largest city in the Czech Republic, sits at the crossroads of Austria, Hungary, Germany, Slovakia, and Poland, and like most Czech food bears all of these influences on the food available in its centre, as well as a few more for good measure. It’s a couple of hours from Prague, has a beautiful city centre, and no tourists whatsoever apart from niche cocktail bar lovers (Brno has two cocktail bars whose renown stretches far and wide in the form of Bar Ktery Neexistuje and Super Panda Circus). I spent a few days in Brno recently as an alternative to Prague (where I got fully ripped off in restaurants twice in three days), and was pleasantly surprised by the high quality and interesting fare on offer. Here’s a few of them – just enough to enjoy a weekend break in the city.

U Tomana

The story of eating in a European city square is obviously one of being generally overcharged for mediocre food in exchange for the view. I reckon U Tomana is probably the best food on a city square I’ve ever had (don’t get too excited, that’s a low bar). U Tomana has schnitzel, goulash, and svíčková (a beef topside stew) on the menu but its confit duck leg, served on a ton of sweet, stewed red cabbage and alongside a Carlsbad dumpling to soak it all up, is outrageously good, with the duck retaining loads of moisture at the same time as perfectly crisping up on the outside. Like any self-respecting Czech restaurant, it has its own microbrewery in the basement, and the Tomanova 12 is an excellent accompaniment.

Buchta C

This very tiny cafe hidden in a courtyard off Brno’s Cabbage Market only makes one thing (apart from a nice coffee), but does it incredibly well. Buchteln are Czech pastries which are baked in a tray and look like icebox rolls, but use a sweet dough and are generally filled with powidl, a type of plum butter that the Czechs are very proud of. Despite its obvious similarity to jam, powidl is made without the sweeteners or gelling agents found in jam, which takes hours – it is delicious, with a depth of flavour and richness absent from jams. The pastry used reminds me of the yeasted dumpling großer germknodel, one of my favourite German desserts, but converted to a coffee-shop friendly pastry. 

The person behind the till at Buchta C will cut you a buchta from its latest oven-fresh batch. Alongside a coffee, eating this bread-roll-but-not sitting out in the courtyard, it’s heaven. I could eat a baker’s dozen.

Zozumi

It’s difficult to tell the story of modern Czech food without talking about Vietnam. There are 38,000 Vietnamese people in the Czech Republic, the third largest group after Slovaks and Ukrainians, the result of a USSR-period Communist solidarity exchange programme between the two countries. Despite this odd Guardian article which seems to suggest that Vietnamese food is new and centred in Prague, the Vietnamese population is distributed across the country and is most prominent in Cheb, a very nice town on the German border with some fantastic Vietnamese food, and one of Europe’s largest Asian open air markets.

Anyway, now I’ve got that complaint out of the way, Brno does indeed also have excellent Vietnamese food. I liked Domovina, on the aforementioned Cabbage Market, which has a strong line in lunchtime salads and will serve you a rarely seen cơm chay (charred rice), but I really liked Zozumi, just down the road, which has achingly fresh produce and served me a gỏi xoài a mango and shrimp Vietnamese salad, which was 90 percent perfect fresh mango, and will live long in the memory.

Lokál U Caipla

I would describe Lokál U Caipla, set just off the centre of Brno, as slightly elevated Czech fare compared to the more prosaic Czech restaurants dotted around Brno, and I would also describe it as amazing. The menu changes every day, but I was served a smoked beef tongue as a starter on my visit, which is the best thing I’ve eaten in the Czech Republic – outrageously smoky with a silken texture and served very simply to not detract from the cooking skill on display. That was followed up with an enormous chop from a Přeštice black-pied pig cooked to perfection, not dry, not undercooked. Sensational fare, and when combined with, you guessed it, the lager from the restaurant’s microbrewery (get the black lager), you get a very special place, which happens to be just across the street from Bar Ktery Neexistuje so you can get a cocktail after.

Gavin Cleaver is a food and drinks writer based in London. For many years, somewhat implausibly, he lived in Texas, where he wrote professionally about barbecue. Read more from Gavin on Something Curated here.

Header photograph: Brno by Eugenia Sol / Pexels.