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Oh, Brother's!

Vinohrady restaurant puts a bright face on ordinary fare
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By Dave Faries
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 11th, 2007 issue

Jan Přerovský/THE PRAGUE POST
Distinction, where art thou? Another typical Czech pub grows in Vinohrady.
Anyone stepping into The Brother’s dining room for the first time will most likely stagger backward, just for a moment, and gasp, “I-i-it’s orange.”
Astonishment is natural in this case. The walls scream a shrill tangerine, broken only by black trim and white accents. Tabletops, pale shirts, even the faces of guests pick up its glow. How else can one react to a room so blazing that the makers of Tang would drop in envy?
The Brother's

U Vodárny at Slezská
Prague 3–Vinohrady
Tel. 224 255 369
Open Mon.–Fri. 11 a.m.–midnight, Sat.–Sun. noon–midnight

Food
Service
Atmosphere
Overall
But here’s the real shocker: Despite the atypical color scheme and grammatically awkward foreign name, The Brother’s is very much a Czech restaurant — authentic right down to the intermittent service. Even after the waitress watched me enter the near-empty dining room, I waited 15 minutes before she deigned to bring a menu. That was one visit. Another time, the mere act of catching someone’s eye for a Budvar refill apparently required more than the prominent display of an empty mug.
True to the restaurant’s Czech soul, the menu offers no English prompts, so foreign guests must know their šunkas, slaninas and panenka plněnás. The kitchen faithfully torches dark meat into almost indistinguishable carbonized lumps. On one visit, I ordered something called mignon Kimball and ended up with two cinders on slices of thin toast. Another time, deadly blasts of extreme heat charred my venison zapečená entree beyond recognition.
From the Menu
  • Caprese 65 Kč
  • Mignon Kimball 99 Kč
  • Old Czech soup 25 Kč
  • Cream of mushroom 35 Kč
  • Stuffed pork 165 Kč
  • Chicken cordon bleu 199 Kč
  • Venison steak 199 Kč
  • Pfeffer steak 215 Kč
  • Budvar 27 Kč
In each case, however, well-conceived sauces struggled to retrieve something from the cremated remains. Dollops resembling Catalina dressing with a serious kick attend to the cindered Kimball. Meanwhile, venison in mushroom sauce is almost rescued by the wonderful woodland creation full of bacon, a full measure of herbs and docile fungi. Drawing a pitched sweet/tart flavor from macerated berries, the sauce allows slumbering meatiness from pan leavings to take shape under more assertive fruity and musty notes.
If they were disposed to go easy on meat, The Brother’s kitchen staff would be fully capable of matching (and perhaps even surpassing) highly regarded rivals. Too often, though, they’re content to settle in among the also-rans.
The chicken cordon bleu lacks any real character — weak processed ham, listless cheese and bland white meat — although the kitchen brings the crust to near-perfect form: crisped to a rich sienna color, an inviting texture drawn from crushed cornflakes. Pork cutlets stuffed with more of that flabby processed ham is another dull but well-prepared dish (discounting a side of violently brackish creamed spinach). I counted only six peppercorns in the sauce dripping over the pepper steak, which otherwise smacked of pickling juice from a jar of the preserved berries. Yet the gray-brown alluvial mass worked well enough when paired with overcooked meat.
Starters share this “almost there” quality. The comfortably thick structure of mushroom cream soup collapses almost instantly into a diaphanous blur. But the flavor profile is pleasant and mellow. A quite satisfying caprese salad relied on deft seasoning — a light drizzle of oil, decent balsamic and herbs — to rescue simple mozzarella and nondescript tomatoes.
Finally, something I translated as “old Czech soup” batters your palate with incoherent strokes of garlic and salt. Clumps of vacuous white cheese bob under the surface, perhaps in the vain hope that the congealed curd will absorb a little of the briny, bitter sting. Or maybe folks brought up in more difficult times considered flavorless, caulky substances nutritious and filling. Whatever the case, it’s a passable homage to rustic, homestyle broths of yore.
The Brother’s slips into the culinary routine far too easily, like hundreds of other pubs teetering between promise and obscurity. In the end, only the restaurant’s brash paint job really stands out.

Dave Faries can be reached at dfaries@praguepost.com


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