Cute crepes

Warning: Food snobbery ahead. Crepes, in my experience, are best eaten in hand, fresh from a food vendor at any hour of the day or night while wandering around Paris. It's not necessarily that they're made better at these vendors, but it's the experience: The cheesy, savory fillings pocketed and folded into a thin-skinned pancake that is mobile and seems to be the delicate inspiration for Taco Bell's Crunchwrap ("Good to go").

So my instincts get mixed up when I order a crepe at a sit-down restaurant. I fumble indecisively between knife and fork and rip off pieces with my hands, trying to scoop up fillings that seem nakedly exposed on the plate. It's akin to eating pizza, empanadas or fried chicken with utensils.

I got over my crepe prejudices at Creperie U Slepé kočičky when our galettes (savory crepes made with buckweat) arrived on a recent afternoon and there was a simple but great surprise: real spinach. Not that frozen crumbly stuff mixed in with powdered garlic that seems to work its way into palačinky in other restaurants, thank God, but real sautéed leaves that elevated the gallettes in two versions, one with chicken, blue cheese and bacon and another with simply chicken and blue cheese. These two dishes allowed us to grab sides of the huge, nutty buckwheat pancake and fold in scoops of filling.

A third, however, proved too messy to tackle with hands, but was wonderfully filling and homey. Ham and cheese were absolutely drenched in a creamy mushroom sauce that had large, tender pieces of brown mushrooms, that were either of the portobello or shitaake variety, but certainly richer than plain white buttons. Crepes never sound like a filling dish, but in these cases, they were more than enough.

On this afternoon, the upstairs, nonsmoking room was a cozy place to watch people on Milady Horákové street or take in the very cutesy cat décor around the room. The enormous, wooden cat statue out front is not a one-off, but an appropriate representation of what you will find inside. Seriously, they have it all, including an oil painting of a Czech cat astronaut, in space, with his arm around a cat alien.

The creperie has, as far as one can tell from two visits, no real cats. There are, however, plenty of families with children. Creperie U Slepé kočičky seems to be enormously family-friendly, at least in the nonsmoking section. The cellar has many more tables, which seem to host groups who are there to drink and talk as much as they are to eat.

On a second dinner-hour visit, the restaurant was nearly completely full. We branched out and ordered a seared salmon fillet with herbed butter, an Argentinean entrecote, creamed spinach and french fries. The entrecote was a bust, the thin cut cooked to well done and hard to chew. The salmon was also cooked to well done, which can do a disservice to a fish that benefits from a medium-well temperature to preserve the silky smooth salmon flesh. A nice touch was a crisped top to the salmon, done not with the skin, which had been removed, but rather a dusting of Parmesan. It was a fine fish dish, but certainly not worth ordering in lieu of the house specialties.

Finally, dessert rolled around, albeit slowly. On the busy night, dishes were very slow to arrive, prolonging a casual dinner to about two hours. Creperie U Slepé kočičky is a cozy space, however, so we weren't terribly perturbed by the slightly longer than usual waits. While the kitchen is slow, the servers are friendly and attentive, bringing drinks refills promptly.

The sweet crepes play on Czech dessert variations rather than French classics. There are no crepes suzette, the butter, orange zest, sugar and flambéed Grand Marnier combination that has enthralled diners for decades. Instead, there are cottage cheese and fruit options, alongside deviations of Nutella, and nuts, as well as plenty of whipped cream and chocolate sauce on each.

Not sure which to order, we tried a daily special of small blueberries and pistachio ice cream. The warmed compote blended wonderfully with the nutty pistachio ice cream and whipped cream, folded in the light pancake that was expertly made. It was enough to share, and left two diners longing for a cat nap.

Creperie U Slepé kočičky has done well in delivering comforting, carby galettes and crepes in a cozy setting, and has obviously taken care to make sure the ingredients are up to the standards of the pancakes themselves. Prague isn't Paris, but that doesn't mean you can't enjoy this universally popular creation at U Slepé kočičky.

Claire Compton can be reached at
ccompton@praguepost.com