Best Restaurants in Karlovy Vary

Karlovy Vary is the grandest of Bohemia's spa towns — a narrow valley of pastel grand hotels, Habsburg colonnades, twelve hot springs, and a 700-year tradition of feeding visiting royalty, writers, composers and statesmen. Goethe came thirteen times. Beethoven, Brahms, Tolstoy and Marx all took the cure. Today the town hosts the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival every July, and the dining circuit shifts upwards for ten days as juries, producers and distributors fill the grand-hotel rooms.

The kitchens trade on three traditions. First, classical Bohemian — roast duck with red cabbage and bread dumplings, svíčková, smoked Carlsbad sausages, the famed Karlovarské lázeňské oplatky (spa wafers). Second, Habsburg-era grand-hotel cooking — French-inflected, multi-course, served in mirrored ballrooms by white-jacketed waiters. Third, a small but growing modern movement led by Le Marché, the town's first serious Michelin player, where chef Jiří Štift works a tasting menu that draws on local game, river fish and Bohemian ferments.

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