Kastrol

Kastrol, located in the remote outskirts of Prague, opened in late 2013. It is the sister of a long established restaurant called Na Pekarne in Cakovicky, a village near Prague, owned by a restaurateur called Mr Fryc. Kastrol is based in a building dating back to 1884 and also has accommodation. It must be one of the few old buildings in the area, which seemed mainly to consist of blocks of flats and offices. It is roughly a twenty-minute drive from the centre of Prague, and although in theory you can get to the vicinity by tram, this is an area where even getting a mobile phone signal is a challenge.

The restaurant offers traditional hearty Czech cuisine. There is no menu, just a selection of dishes of the day on a blackboard (no English menus here, this is way off the tourist trail). The ground floor dining room is quite simple and feels more like a pub than restaurant, with wooden floor and no tablecloths. However the staff were welcoming and there was even free Wi-Fi available.

A goat cheese salad had walnuts and segments of orange in amongst the goat cheese and leaves, which had a pleasant dressing. This was decent enough though hard to get excited about (11/20). Better was confit duck with red cabbage and potato dumplings. The duck was tender and the cabbage excellent, carefully cooked with a nice sweet and sour kick from some wine vinegar; the dumplings were, however, distinctly dense (12/20 overall but the cabbage was better than the rest).

Chocolate cake was rather rustic, a wedge of slightly chalky tasting chocolate served with cream (10/20). Coffee was basic, a touch bitter. The bill came to just CZK 527 (£16) for one person for three courses, with a couple of beers to drink. This price certainly puts the prices in central Prague into sharp relief. The restaurant was very busy even on a Tuesday night, with tables being turned, and my young waiter was very helpful and spoke reasonable English. Kastrol is clearly aimed at a local audience, and is serving pleasant enough food at a very fair price. However as a visitor to the city it is not obviously somewhere to make an excursion to, given its somewhat bleak location.