Sunday Brunch at Bohemia Bagels

Hello, followers of my great dad's great blog about great food. I'm Ken's youngest daughter, Noele, and I'm spending the semester abroad in Prague. As you may have gleaned from my dad's post about knedliky and smazeny syr (Czech bread dumplings and fried cheese), Prague is not exactly the culinary capitol of the world. However, there is one restaurant that we've found that we love going to.

Bohemia Bagels is a quirky Bagel joint with three locations throughout Prague: Holešovice (the neighborhood I live in), Malá strana ("Lesser Town," just across the Charles Bridge), and Old Town (close to the NYU class buildings as well as the main city center of Prague). This place serves a great array of sandwiches (served on bagels), salads, soups, and entrees, but my friends and I usually go for brunch on Sunday mornings. NYU students have a sort of religious obsession with sunday brunch.  

If you're planning on travelling to Prague any time soon, I would definitely recommend going to this place for breakfast, especially if you're sick of beer cheese soup and pork knee with gravy, which I can almost guarantee you will be. You won't find traditional Czech cuisine there, but if you have a sturdy head on your shoulders this should come as quite a relief. There's a high contingency of British ex pats who work there (at least at the Holešovice location), so language is not usually a problem, but the restaurant is not excessively touristy. 

 Bohemia Bagels has quite a bit in way quirky ambiance. The picture to the left is the view looking into the bar from the main dining room. Interestingly enough, this section is also the "smoking section." Yup, that still exists. I think I was maybe eight years old max the last time I was asked "smoking or non-smoking?" But while in the United States indoor smoking has become a distant piece of folklore, it is very much alive in Prague.

Below is a picture of my friends at our regular Sunday table in the main dining room, getting ready to feast.

Every single week, I get the same thing: an egg and cheese sandwich on a bagel and a bottle of orange juice. What kind of bagel the sandwich arrives on is usually sort of a game of Russian Roulette, but this week I wised up and specified that I wanted an everything bagel. That sandwich is sustaining my toiling fingers as they type these words. Here's how awesome my breakfast looks: 

Three of my friends got the eggs benedict, which we basically all agree is the best thing ever, or at least the best thing on the Bohemia Bagels brunch menu. Like regular eggs benedict, Bohemia Bagels serves up two poached eggs with hollandaise sauce over thick cut bacon. The thing that makes this dish special, though, is that in lieu of english muffins (which nobody really likes anyways), they serve the eggs, hollandaise, and bacon over lump crab cakes. All of this is paired with a little arugula salad, potato hash and a mini bagel. I can hear my mom and dad drooling from four thousand miles away. 

Another one of my friends got the "Charles IV," which is a stack of pancakes with maple syrup, a mini bagel, bacon, sausage, and two eggs. We're not exactly sure why this particular breakfast is named after Charles IV, but people in the Czech Republic are just generally obsessed with this guy, so it wasn't a huge shock. She looks extremely overwhelmed/joyed in the picture below, and for good reason. There was no way this delicious meal could be finished by one person, but we did our best to help her out. You're welcome, Olivia. 

My friend Katie got "The Full Monte," which is comprised of an omelet, two sausages, bacon, baked beans with ham, mushrooms, a mini bagel, and roasted tomatoes. She seemed pretty happy, judging from how much was left on the plate about an hour later. Which was nothing. Another upside of Bohemia Bagels that my caffeine fiending New Yorker friends really appreciate is that they serve bottomless American drip coffee, which is actually extremely hard to find in the Czech Republic and in most places in Europe. What you usually have to get is an Americano, which is basically a shot of espresso diluted with water. We serve these at the ice cream store I work at in Lexington, MA (Rancatore's Ice Cream and Yogurt) as well in lieu of drip coffee, and as a non-coffee drinker I always thought they two were exactly the same. However, Katie informed me that drip coffee is actually more highly caffeinated than an Americano because the water has more prolonged contact with the caffeinated coffee beans. 

If you're not looking to have eggs, there are still options for you here. My friend Ellen got the tofu breakfast wrap, which is essentially curried tofu and vegetables in a wrap served with french fries and a small salad. 

We absolutely adore Bohemian Bagels, and we think they adore us too. If you want to know more about my travels, follow my blog "Dear Julie," at http://dearjulieprague.blogspot.com/. Thanks for reading! 

-Guest blogger Noele