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July 20th, 2008

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The good food lover

Prague's premier gourmand prefers simple meals followed by the occasional cigarette

By Dave Faries
Staff Writer, The Prague Post
April 2nd, 2008 issue

JAN PŘEROVSKÝ/THE PRAGUE POST

Publisher Pavel Maurer is known in foodie circles for single-handedly improving the Prague dining scene. enlarge

The Maurer File

Born: 1959 in Hranice
Personal: Married for the second time, two kids
Former positions: Creative director, Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy
Current positions: Publisher, Grand Restaurant guide; director, Prague Food Festival
Favorite restaurant: He'll never say

You can’t smoke in Maze restaurant, and Pavel Maurer wants a cigarette.

“I’m a casual smoker only,” he assures me, of the kind prone to light up during social events with a drink in hand.

It is early afternoon when we meet up at the Gordon Ramsay concept in New Town, but already Maurer, a professorial former ad-man, has spent a couple of hours involved in lunchtime conversation at the restaurant. Chef Phillip Carmichael then hustles over to join him for a cup of coffee and a few more words.

Now, he faces an interview — another hour or more of back-and-forth banter.

Maurer’s life is one continuous social event, a string of parties and press conferences. He counts among his close acquaintances the likes of tennis legend Martina Navrátilova, President Václav Klaus and Michelin star chef Andrea Accordi.

Restaurateurs credit the man with reviving interest in Czech fine dining once quashed by communism. His annual Grand Restaurant guide stands as the most comprehensive and respected book of its kind. Kitchens in the city vie for booth space at the Prague Food Festival, Maurer’s wildly successful brainchild.

“Thanks to him, Czechs have started to talk about food and restaurants,” says Jiří Štift, chef at Alcron in the Radisson Hotel.

Starting with soup

Seated in the bar moments later, a cigarette issuing comfortable white trails above his head, Maurer hardly resembles the arbiter of Prague’s dining scene. He’s far too sincere for the role, almost completely lacking overt self-confidence or “look at me” flamboyance — he’s more like the shy kid from school, all grown up.

“It’s funny,” he says, chuckling. “Tomato soup was one of the most awful things you could get in a school cafeteria.” Still learning English, he searches for the final word — “do you call it ‘canteen?’ ” — while piecing together in one calm sentence the difference between a generation dulled by the severe practicalities of a controlled economy and one awakened to food as something to savor.

“But when I first tasted tomato soup in an Italian restaurant,” he continues, fidgeting with an ashtray, “it was like another universe.”

Czechs learned about food along with Maurer. Under the communist system, restaurants were restricted to a single recipe book full of precise weights and measures—a device to help government inspectors prevent kitchen staff from helping themselves to, say, a few slices of meat. Only two or three foreign restaurants, visited for the most part by party officials, broke up the monotony of pub fare.

Following the Velvet Revolution, new establishments began to venture into the market — with mixed results. Maurer took a job writing copy for Any, a local advertising agency staffed by young professionals eager to sample flavors flooding into the city.

“We were wondering how to find good restaurants,” he recalls.

One day, while perusing a French library, Maurer discovered the famous Michelin Guide — page after page of restaurants recommended by professional critics, delineated with symbols, described in rich paragraphs and just the thing Prague needed.

“But what could we do in this country?” he wondered. “There are no people who really know food, so it’s not possible.”

Then an acquaintance from New York provided a way around the impossible, introducing Maurer to an American resource based on surveys of folks who dine out on a regular basis — the Zagat Guide.

In 1997, after quizzing 100 Czech foodies, Maurer put together his first Grand Restaurant guide, a flimsy work with a lofty title.

Today, more than 2,000 diners contribute to his tome, bulging past 260 pages, rating 440 establishments across the Czech Republic. The project spawned a Web site, an e-mail newsletter, events to honor the top 10 restaurants and, most recently, a food festival attracting more than 10,000 visitors.

At the same time, Prague slowly developed a fine dining culture, attracted top chefs and, most recently, earned its first-ever Michelin star, awarded to Allegro.

An ‘infectious passion’

Maybe Maurer’s rise merely coincided with the city’s growing sophistication. But most observers believe the star, the opening of worldly restaurants like La Degustation, the arrival of celebrity-driven concepts — that none of this would be possible without his efforts.

“His passion for this is infectious, really,” explains Carmichael, a newcomer to Prague. “Demanding quality food, he introduced that to the Czech people.

“We can open restaurants, but, unless there’s interest, what’s the point? People respect what he writes.”

Maurer refuses to accept any of this. The guidebook idea, he borrowed it. Same with the food festival — spurred by a visit he made to a similar event in Scotland. And that top 10 ranking so coveted by local restaurateurs?

“We just count numbers,” he says, the guide and the top 10 being a “mirror of Czech tastes,” nothing more. It’s just that these happen to reflect Maurer’s tastes, too.

He grew up in Hranice, a small town in Moravia. Maurer’s father, a colonel in the Czechoslovak Army, and mother often ushered young Pavel to his grandmother’s during summer months.

“I spent a lot of my childhood at her house,” he recalls. Before dinner, he chopped wood for the stove and watched her prepare ingredients — not really caring at the time just what ended up on his plate.

“She hated cooking,” Maurer says of his grandmother. Yet these moments, tending the fire while an old woman fussed with pots and pans and a container of fresh vegetables from the garden, instilled a sense of pleasure — associated with food and tucked away somewhere in his senses, waiting to be awakened by a revolution and a bowl of tomato soup.

“I still like simple food,” he remarks with a sentimental smile. “If you have a good product, you don’t need much else.”

Last year, just before anticipation of Prague’s first Michelin star stirred, before a flurry of notable restaurant openings, before anyone hinted that 2007 might represent the finest year in the city’s culinary history, Maurer abruptly quit his advertising career — 15 years as a copy writer and then creative director with Young & Rubicam and Ogilvy — to concentrate on culinary projects.

He celebrated by stamping “Good Food Lover” on his new business cards.

“My art director asked ‘What do you want on your card?’ ” Maurer explains, shuffling in his chair, clearly uncomfortable with any pretentious implications. “I don’t want to be a critic and I don’t necessarily understand the food. I just love food.”

He is inclined to promote hard-working kitchens and steer guests to undiscovered locations — probably a habit after all those years pushing slogans. But he also wants average diners to appreciate what’s at stake in those “Where should we eat?” conversations. Most consumers research their options before purchasing, say, a new television. In a culture that once boasted a “good because it’s cheap” mentality, however, guidebooks, rating systems and professional opinion have yet to become second nature.

“People are not so willing to invest time investigating food,” Maurer says. “But they are spending money.”

This, essentially, is what drives the good food lover. Ask him about crowds at last year’s food festival, and he singles out a couple who traveled half a day by bus just to spend a few hours wandering from booth to booth.

Still, cutting himself loose from the security of big multinational salaries took guts. “Being in advertising, you don’t have financial problems,” he points out ruefully. “In this business, it’s not so certain.” He takes no money for listings in his guide. Before his need for nicotine forced us to the bar, I watch him shell out several thousand crowns for lunch. He even tries to pay for drinks served during our interview.

Memorable meals

Quitting the advertising world made sense, however.

“It’s just like with a car,” he says, resorting to analogy. “If you drive a Škoda and then a Ferrari, you feel a difference — and sometimes it’s difficult to come back.”

Maurer’s growing stature as Prague’s leading restaurant advocate rerouted his priorities from those of a stable family man (wife and two kids) and pillar of the city’s upper middle class to, well, a kind of culinary vagabond.

“My goal is to visit all the restaurants in my book,” he says, smiling broadly at the thought of conquering 440 joints spread around the country — a feat, he concedes, that seems impossible.

So, instead, he constantly tries new establishments and samples different menu items, confining wanderlust to the plate, trying to prevent one place from blurring with another.

Keeping everything straight is tough, he allows. “But always you remember something.”

It’s true. After years and years of dining, memorable bits and pieces stick with you. For Maurer, at the moment, Café Imperial’s leg of lamb stands out as “one of the best meals I’ve had in the past six months.”

In the context of this interview, my opinion doesn’t matter, although he is curious to know what I think as a professional critic.

We also both deal with one question — always the same — whenever we meet someone for the first time: What’s your favorite restaurant?

“How do you handle that one?” I ask.

Maurer squirms uncomfortably then responds with a query of his own, “What do you answer?”

My standard retort, I tell him, runs along the lines of “Hard to say. What’s yours?”

He leans back and grins, nudging the ashtray aside as he answers.

“Hard to say.”

Dave Faries can be reached at dfaries@praguepost.com

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