Prague Restaurants Serving High-end Czech Food?!??!

by Neil Woodburn on

Sorry, folks. But no one visits the Czech Republic for the food. Sure, I grew to like it when I lived there, and it was cheap, but unless you like rather bland meat, potatoes and dumplings, then save your palate for finer fare elsewhere.

That’s simply the way it’s been for many years now.

According to a recent New York Times article, however, the Czech culinary scene is surprisingly changing. A number of high-end Czech restaurants serving traditional Czech food (!) are popping up all over Prague. Instead of $1 plates of goulash, the chefs are serving up escabeche, beef tartare, “white tomato meringue, topped with honey and aged balsamic vinegar,” “ravioli, stuffed with diced beef lungs,” and much, much more. Just check out the slide show here!

Journalist Evan Rail recently took a culinary tour of the Czech capital and his review was something I’d expect to find in a place like France or Belgium. But instead, it was all about the long-established doldrums of the culinary world where high-end Czech restaurants are now offering up first class, traditional meals that can run seven courses long and cost hundreds of dollars.

Man, things have come a long way since my first visit in 1990 when they used ketchup to top their pizzas.

Oktoberfest Lessons: The Chicken Dance

by Jamie Rhein on

To get you ready for this Oktoberfest season, we’ve advised you on what to wear– Lederhosen, given you instructions on how to eat a Weisswurst, shown you the best carnival rides to try, and pointed you towards the best beer. To recap, we’ve hit dress, food, entertainment and libations. What’s missing from this Oktoberfest round-up is dancing. To prevent the situation where you are left standing in your Lederhosen gazing into your beer mug, unsure of what to do on the dance floor, here’s a lesson on the Chicken Dance. Any Oktoberfest celebration wouldn’t be complete without it. Perhaps, you’ve seen it at a wedding. Even when guests are sloshed, this one is doable.

For the easy version, all that’s really required is that you:

  1. Put the fingers and thumbs of each hand together so that you have two chicken beaks–sort of
  2. Raise your beaks to at least shoulder level to look engaged an interested–higher is better–and open and close them four times to the other dancers
  3. Bend your arms at the elbows to simulate bird wings and flap four times.
  4. Wiggle your behind as you bend and your knees so you lower to the floor and comeback up as you continue to wiggle. (Try to do this to four beats in order to look like a pro.)
  5. Repeat the steps, but going faster and faster until the song ends.

Here’s a Chicken Dance how -to run down, complete with an animated chicken, and a You Tube video with a variety of Chicken Dances performed last year at the Oktoberfest in Leavenworth, Washington. As the video shows, you can do this dance several times in a day and it’s just a little different each time–as in a tad different, as in almost identical.

Band on the Run: Farewell from New York’s Chinatown

by Ember Swift on

Ember Swift, Canadian musician and touring performer, has been keeping us up-to-date on what it’s like to tour a band throughout North America. This is her final post in this series. Having just arrived back from Beijing where she spent three months (check out her “Canadian in Beijing” series), this series offers a musician’s perspective on road life.

My final post for “Band on the Run” fittingly brings me full-circle. I started blogging for Gadling with my trip to China in April and then I came back to North America and hit the road with my band again while simultaneously starting this series, “Band on the Run.” Now that I’m planning my return to China in just under a month, it seems fitting that my last post for “Band on the Run” be about the largest Chinatown in North America: New York City’s Chinatown.

Founded in the 1970’s by Chinese immigrants, this is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in New York. It is located on the East Side of Lower Manhattan and easily accessible by car or subway. It’s full of life and colour and interesting juxtapositions of culture and architecture and smells.

I loved it!

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We had the afternoon to wander around and the day was beautiful and sunny, like a rush of summer in September. Having been in and out of New York at least once a year over the past decade, it’s amazing how little time I’ve actually spent there. We rarely have the down time to actually hang out in the city and check out new neighbourhoods. It’s often just a quick arrival after fighting traffic, load-in, set-up, sound check, play, tear down, pack up and drive out (because accommodations are so expensive in the city.)

I had never seen New York’s Chinatown and I was eager to walk around, use my Mandarin and see if I couldn’t find some “su baozi” or steamed veggie buns like I’d enjoyed so much in Beijing. And, well, I was also looking forward to just enjoying the late summer sunshine and feeling like tourists for a moment.

Lyndell and I pulled up and found parking (with our big white van – that’s sometimes tough in New York!) just on East Broadway and Straus Square. We happened to find a broken parking meter, which is the equivalent to striking gold in a big city! That means that we had the right to park as long as we wanted — liberation from having to feed the parking meter all day!

We weaved around the streets and poked our heads into bakeries and shops. I had a few conversations with strangers about baozi and realized that I was saying it wrong when everyone thought I was asking about a newspaper. I corrected my tones and then mostly had conversations about why I was a vegetarian and how hard it is to find Chinese buns that aren’t meat or sweet-filled. In the end, I got no information about where to find them, but I did discover a great supermarket that was considered the center of Chinatown by several different people: the Hong Kong Supermarket.

Lyndell and I went in and I was rocketed back to Beijing. The smells, the action, the way the products were displayed, even. I found the entire environment reminded me of the shops I frequented in Wudaokou. The products were also very similar but also included products from Thailand and more American products than I ever saw in China. Still, it felt like I was back there somehow, and what a joy it was to introduce that experience to Lyndell who has yet to see China on her own.

We slowly walked through the store and I bought some necessary items to kick out my head cold (like ginger and sinus tea) and also some glutinous rice cakes and tofu products that I had never eaten back home until I’d been in China. (Lyndell was excited to try them as well and she has officially fallen in love with the sweet rice cakes.) What’s more is that two bags of groceries later and we only spent twenty-five dollars, which included a huge bottle of sweet chilli sauce that I normally find is overpriced in non-Asian grocery outlets.

We headed back to the van after that to put the groceries away and then ducked into a small bar for happy hour. Y’know, it’s been ages since I was at a bar during happy hour and it was great! This little bar, Bar 169, also hosts live music and had several old-fashioned games like a bowling game that required a small puck, pinball and a rickety old pool table. The graffiti on the walls in the bathroom marked years of philosophy during occupancy. I love these kinds of places, the small bars tucked away but opening you into a rush of history when you stumble into their warmth.

When we emerged back onto the sidewalk, it was my (tea-drinker) turn to do the driving (!) and I glanced up as I was about to pull away and finally noticed the beautiful park on the corner that we had been parked beside the whole time: Straus Square. Huge trees and wide gates marked the entrance and seemed like a shaded nature retreat from the bright afternoon sun sparkling off the city traffic. (As this area shares a lot of history with the Jewish population of New York, I mostly found information about this park through sites advertising Jewish history walking tours of Manhattan.)

I smiled then, at the perfection of the afternoon, the chance to see this part of the city and the chance to share this image of China, if only an off-shore reflection, with the person I love the most in the most in the world.

One day, we’ll do a full tour of China. I’m headed back there to try to put those contacts in place as well as to continue my pursuit of fluency in Mandarin. Until then, you’ll definitely hear from me while I’m there . I’m looking forward to digging up some interesting layers from the Beijing underground world. And, of course, I’ll share my stories.

Thanks so much to everyone who has supported this series. “Band on the Run” has reached its finish line.

Take care,

Ember Swift

Sex Toys and Sausages: A Bad Smuggling Combination

by Neil Woodburn on

Butchers in Mannheim, Germany alerted police on Wednesday when a customer speaking broken English asked the shop keepers to hold on to two “Schwartenmagen” sausages he had purchased from them earlier in the day. He told the butchers he was flying to Dubai the following day and asked if they could store his Schwartenmagen in their refrigerator for the night.

The butchers became suspicious, however, when they noticed that the Schwartenmagen were much heavier than they should be. Concerned that the 50-year old man on his way to the Middle East might be using the sausage to smuggle something dangerous on to the plane, they immediately called the police.

A crack squad of Germany’s finest arrived on the scene where they quickly wrestled the sausages to the ground and discovered a rather large sex toy embedded in each of Schwartenmagen. I’ll let you guess what type of sex toy might fit within a hollowed out sausage.

Hey, isn’t there a better way to smuggle those things? It sort of makes you wonder why the old prison method wasn’t used instead. Ugh!

Today’s Bad Eng(r)ish

by Matthew Firestone on

Here at Gadling, we try to keep our eyes to the ground in search of amusing English the world over. Truth be told, sometimes we can’t please everyone, but let it be known that our intention is never to offend.

With that said, I would like to bring you this photo advertising a yakiniku (grilled meat, ??????) restaurant that I scoped out this week in Tokyo. As an aspiring vegetarian, I try to avoid eating red meat whenever possible, but I just couldn’t pass this one up.

After all, roast meat does give you more power…