On Friday, the magnificent Prague Castle gardens will open to host the annual Prague Food Festival – a three-day celebration of fine dining and healthy eating. Foodies from Prague and elsewhere will converge at the venue to sample the delicacies prepared by three dozen classy restaurants and enjoy the festival’s varied accompanying programme.
Pavel Maurer, photo: CTK
Now in its sixth year, the Prague Food Festival has become a highlight in the calendars of the city’s foodie community. Offering specialities from some of the most exclusive restaurants for affordable prices, the festival traditionally attracts thousands of visitors. Not only are their palates becoming more sophisticated but Czechs are increasingly becoming more conscious about the origin of their food and the distance it travelled to reach their plates. “Think global, eat local” is the festival’s motto for this year, chosen by the Czech gourmet guru Pavel Maurer – the man behind the Prague Food Festival.
Photo: CTK
“This sixth year of the Prague Food Festival is different in many respects. One of the big differences is that we have totally changed the cooking show. Instead of a classic cooking show we will have mostly presentations or workshops of ingredient suppliers from Italy, from Spain, from Andalusia and other countries which will present the ingredients and how you can cook with them. We will also present organic food from farmers. A lot of the restaurants that you will be able to see at the Prague Food Festival prepare their meals from ingredients from farmers.”
One of the chefs selected by Pavel Maurer to showcase her favourite dishes is the Prague-based Sofia Smith of Le Patio restaurant, recently interviewed here on Radio Prague. This is the mouth-watering list of dishes she’s preparing for the feast.
Sofia Smith
“It’s our first time at the food festival. We are doing several dishes, one of them is an Indonesian-style slow cooked beef, the beef is from a local farm, it’s organic beef, cooked with lots of Indonesian spices, served with some rice and pineapple relish. We are doing a south Indian dish, a vegetarian dish with chick peas and paneer, which is an Indian cheese. We’re also doing Singapore black pepper prawns, stir-fried, and also some calamari with homemade sweet chilli sauce. And we have sticky toffee pudding, the very, very classic English dessert I’ve been doing for years with clotted cream, English cream, and some other desserts as well. It’s a bit overwhelming at the moment because it’s our first time at the food festival. I’ve been told that we have to prepare a lot of portions!”
If you are in town give your taste buds a treat. Tickets to the three-day event are still available at the festival’s website. If you can’t make it, Radio Prague will be there to bring you a digest of the tastes and aromas – if only in sound.
