Bar worshiping Žufánka, the best dill in Prague and rockets. Why Hotel Yalta will shine again
In mid-January, we wrote about the new unique Gallery 44 restaurant, where you could enjoy a new fine dining menu in the 12th-century cellar, surrounded by art, prepared by a different guest chef.
Six months and everything is different.
Today, a sad message is already shining on the door of the company in Karlov 44: “The coronavirus pandemic addresses us, and so Gallery 44 has a holiday since July.” However, the next sentence attracts another unexpected place, the Hotel Jalta on Wenceslas Square.
“We had to do something, didn’t we?” Gallery 44, the architect, and Yalta Craft Bistro, are asking a rhetorical question. After closing his dream restaurant indefinitely, Jan Šimice is still in a good mood. After all, he had a place to catch her – he worked for Sanjiv Suri for many years.
“Sanjiv taught me a lot of things and so far I draw from my engagement in Zátiší,” he says with a dose of nostalgia and with a deep breath he adds that he and the king of Prague’s fine dining have not seen each other for years.
In any case, Hotel Jalta is a legendary place, the location of which is mostly known even to those who travel to Prague only festively. The consecration of the science that it included the Como restaurant for years, is often used for business meetings and parties (subjective note: when it comes to food, not great, not terrible). Šimice had already shown interest in the company about a year and a half ago, but the owner of the Yalta Hotel and Flow East, real estate businessman James Woolf, did not want to let go.
That only changed with the pandemic, when Como got into trouble. “Suddenly everything opened up again and we had to express what we would pay for it,” Šimice muses. Let’s set aside long negotiations on money, 150-page contracts and almost last-backs. It is essential that if they and their partner Tomáš Procházka also received very advantageous rents for the rest of the year, they were able to reach a level that makes economic sense for them for the next year and 2022.
“Despite the address, we said to ourselves that we don’t want a bloated, rather bistro… Although with 290 seats probably the first one big in the world,” laughs Šimice and continues to describe ambitions. “Without it, we want to express smaller tables, nice approach and good price / performance ratio. I want to transfer the atmosphere of Karlín and Letná, which I absorb when the children pull me to their favorite places. “
On the menu, most meals can cost up to 250 crowns, which is great in the context of location and quality. Cod with tzar caviar, pork loin with pearl barley, but especially a completely phenomenal dill, which will get even those who carry tragic memories from the school canteen, are definitely worth tasting. Served by chef Marek Šada, “koprovka” is a homemade ravioli stuffed with beef cheek in dill sauce and really a reason to return to the hotel on Wenceslas Square again and again.
“It’s a rocket, isn’t it?” There, on my soul, hang two giant colored rockets. I will save you a question and immediately reveal that it is the work of the artist Jiří Černický, of whom Šimice is a great admirer. After all, Gallery 44, as the name suggests, proudly decorated works of art in collaboration with DSC Gallery.
However, it does not end with rockets. At the very end of the space, where it is not even properly visible from the summer garden, there is a bar hidden behind black curtains, which is currently undergoing construction modifications. But it is Šimice who enjoys it the most. “I think we will open it at the end of August, and that will be absolutely gone,” he says over the future OMY bar.
The acronym, as fans of the distillery Martin Žufánka undoubtedly suspects, hides Oh My Yalta, which is a reference to his iconic OMG gin. “Everything Martin has will be with us, and there will even be some bottles exclusively… It will be Žufánek’s embassy,” adds Šimice. The pearl of the story is that Yalta was the place where Martin Žufánek stayed 20 years ago when he arrived in Prague to sell his first pieces.
So the circle closed, just as when Jan Šimice takes a deep breath at the end of our lunch and puts the phone to his ear: “Sanjiv, hello my dear friend, long time no see…”