Cafés in Czechia Prague

Brno, the Moravian coffee town

Brno's coffee trade grew fast after Achmet. By 1717 the town had three burgher coffeehouses, and two years later it had six.² Around 1900 Brno had 37 cafés, of which only three were in Czech hands. Its kavárny (cafés) were at their most famous in the first half of the 20th century. After the First World War, architects including Fuchs, Kumpošt and Wiesner designed functionalist cafés that rank among the best modern buildings of the period.³

Café Era, at Zemědělská 30 in Černá Pole, is the one that survives. Josef Kranz designed it in 1927 and it was built in 1928–1929, with a restaurant on the ground floor, a café with billiards and a terrace above, and a façade that borrows from the Dutch De Stijl group.⁶ It was nationalized in 1959, listed as a cultural monument in 1977 and closed in 1978. After a rebuild partly paid for by EU regional funds, its café reopened in spring 2011.⁶

Brno's newer cafés roast their own beans. The city's tourist board lists Punkt., which pours coffee from its own roastery, and Rebelbean Pole, which roasts on site.¹¹

Czech and German tables in Prague

Two lost Prague cafés show the city's two literatures. Kavárna Union, on the corner of Národní and Na Perštýně, was the Czech one. The writer Alois Jirásek, the painter Mikoláš Aleš and the sculptor Josef Václav Myslbek were regulars, and a younger set followed: the architects Pavel Janák and Josef Gočár, the painter Josef Lada and the writer Jaroslav Hašek.⁷ Karel Čapek defended the café in a 1923 editorial. It closed around 1941, and the house was demolished in 1949–1950.⁷

Kavárna Arco opened in autumn 1907 at the corner of Dlážděná and Hybernská, near today's Masaryk station. From 1908 it was the base of Prague's German-language writers: Franz Werfel and Max Brod were regulars, Franz Kafka came now and then, and the Viennese critic Karl Kraus nicknamed the crowd the Arconauts.⁸ After the Second World War it became a fourth-class pub, and by 2017 it was a self-service restaurant run for the Interior Ministry.⁸

Kávovina and the Jihlava roastery

When beans were scarce, Czechs drank kávovina (coffee substitute). Melta was created in the 1940s from roasted chicory root, sugar beet, barley and rye, and is still made by Kávoviny in Pardubice. It has no caffeine and is usually drunk with milk or cream.⁹

One of the best-selling Czech coffee brands grew out of a 1950s plant. In 1958 a packing and roasting plant opened in Jihlava, and its coffee carried only the letter B, for the Balírny obchodu works. Tchibo bought the operation in 1991 and created the Jihlavanka brand in 1993.¹⁰ Roasting in Jihlava stopped in 2005, and the headquarters moved to Prague in 2011; Jihlavanka is now roasted in Poland and other EU countries.¹⁰

Prague

Prague's coffee story begins on Liliová in the Old Town. Deodatus first sold coffee informally in front of a house there, on the site of today's house U Zlatého hada (At the Golden Snake).⁴ He then took rooms across the river in the House at the Three Ostriches in Malá Strana, where he reportedly opened Prague's first public coffeehouse in 1714.⁵

The old center still holds a café of a kind found nowhere else. The kavárna in the House of the Black Madonna is described as the only cubist café in the world.⁴ Outside the capital, Český Těšín on the Polish border has a restored interwar café, the Avion.⁴