Gingerbread is one of my favorite foods on Earth, so I was intrigued when I read about this gingerbread shop in Prague. It's located down a little side street but look for the green doors and you know you've found it. Walking inside is like stepping foot into a magical cookie palace! It's a tiny shop that's crammed full of cookies in all shapes, sizes, and colors. It's such a colorful place that you'll want to take lots of photos.
There are big cookies, small cookies, gigantic cookies, cookies with hearts, cats, flowers, frogs, penguins, trains, cars, dogs, cartoon characters, flowers, maps of the Czech Republic and more. Watch out if you go here with kids, as I think they will be very overstimulated. I'm an adult and it was a feast for my eyes as well as my tummy!
The staff was less than friendly (hey, c'mon guys, you're obviously a tourist destination, how about a little more hospitality?) but we managed to complete our transaction with very limited English.
Prices are high, especially for Prague. I chose a traditional sized gingerbread boy and a miniature iced flower for around $5. I thought the cookies were quite bland and disappointing overall, so much so that I would not recommend you go out of your way to visit this store. It also concerns me how long some of these cookies have been sitting on the shelf because there were literally thousands of cookies for sale.
Maybe I should've picked something different, but I really don't get the fuss about this place (and I've eaten traditional gingerbread all over Germany, from North, South, East and West, so I'm very well versed in the diverse styles and methods of gingerbread)! At least the crunchy icing on my cookies was a work of art -- there were two women sitting at a table in the middle of the place hand-piping icing onto cookies!
Still, this place cranks out lots of traditional Czech gingerbread, and it's made with a simple recipe of butter, honey, nuts and warming spices. Buy a piece of the poppy seed kolache if you want a taste of a real Czech treat. read more