Grandrestaurant Pupp

The Grandrestaurant at the Hotel Pupp is one of Europe's great surviving grand-hotel dining rooms — chandeliers, gilded mirrors, a coffered ceiling, white tablecloths and a string trio that plays through dinner six nights a week. The hotel itself dates to 1701; the restaurant has fed every monarch, composer and head of state who has come to take the spa waters since the early 19th century. Casino Royale's poker finale was filmed in the room. The James Bond Suite is upstairs.

The cooking is unapologetically classical. Vichyssoise. Beef Wellington carved tableside. Whole turbot in beurre blanc. Soufflé Grand Marnier. The kitchen is technically immaculate and the plates look exactly as they would have a generation ago — which is, increasingly, the point. There is also a parallel Bohemian section: Pupp's roast duck with Carlsbad dumplings is the version every Czech grandmother references.

The wine cellar is one of central Europe's most serious — a deep French spine (Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne), the best of Moravian whites, vintage Tokaji, and an extensive selection of pre-revolution central-European labels. The sommelier team has been together for years and the pairings are confident and well-priced.

Service is white-jacket formal in a way that has almost vanished from European dining — every cover gets a captain, plates are silver-domed, bread service is properly executed. A six-course dinner with wines runs around 6,500 CZK. There is no other room in the country quite like it.

There are very few rooms in Europe still capable of staging a proposal at this scale. The chandeliers, the string trio, the mirrors that double the candlelight, the staff who know to step well back at the right moment — all of it is engineered for an evening you will tell people about for the rest of your life. Book the corner table by the window onto Mírové náměstí.