I’m a little disappointed.
Today while shopping I ran across a book called Cool Restaurants Prague. Having lived in this fair city, and frequented what I thought were its “cool” restaurants, I was excited to find a book all about them. The only problem was that the book was wrapped in plastic. No worries, I thought. How could someone screw up such an easy concept?
So, I bought the book and just spent the afternoon glancing through it.
Cool Restaurants is actually a series of books published by teNeues Publishing Group in Italy that spotlights “cool” eating establishments in more than 20 cities across the world. The concept is simple: offer a few pages of photographs of the interior of each, showcase one recipe, and then move on to the next restaurant.
The problem with the Prague book is that it is soulless. The majority of photographs lack warmth and charm and fail entirely in, what I assume, is their goal of evoking cozy, architecturally arousing eating establishments that are hip, beautiful, and… cool. Sure, a few of them do indeed look great and I would love to check them out, but the book as a whole fails to motivate, inspire, or even tempt my appetite. I’m not sure about the others in the series, but had the Prague book not been wrapped, I would have had the opportunity to leaf through it and then put it aside.
Of course, I might simply be bitter that nearly every restaurant in the book was new to me. If they are indeed the city’s new crop of “cool” restaurant, I’m no longer in the know. And that’s depressing.