What is Czech Kitchen?

I am an expat. I have left the safe havens of home for the wild wild East (???) of Europe, with my wife of 6 years, who is a citizen of this wild place called the Czech Republic. Now, living, and eating, in Canada has become two things...endless opportunities, and endless disappointments. The opportunities come from the world at your doorstep. You can buy what you want, when you want, and you can believe that it is going to be fresh and of a high quality. The disappointment comes from the level of service you receive in a restaurant. The recent 10 year boom that came to a screeching halt in October with the meltdown of the "American dynasty" had created a situation where restaurants were forced to hire everyone and anyone that walked through the door asking for a job. You can imagine what this did to product quality...

Now that I am in the (largely and, probably, temorarily) unaffected cocoon of the Czech Republic, when it comes to the recession, the opportunities are once again endless, and so are the disappointments. But here, it is endless opportunities to consume some type of processed pork, and disappointments in the freshness of everything but the damned potatoes and the blood dripping off that piece of pork they just dropped on your plate.

Living a culinary lifestyle - and in saying that, in no way do I mean it to be a synonym of extravagant - in Prague is difficult, even if you have a few extra ten-thousand crown bills lying around every month. The specialty shops are difficult to access, and the supermarkets just don't carry much too special except the new mayo salad with extra chunks of ham. The days of having a full service asian and mediterranean supermarket at your fingertips is long gone. The days of inventing new mediterranean-slavic fusion food has arrived!