Le Marché

Le Marché has, in the space of a few short years, become the most ambitious kitchen in west Bohemia. Tucked into a townhouse on Stará Louka — directly opposite the Mill Colonnade — the room is glass-fronted, low-lit, and quietly precise: pale oak floors, dark walls, a single long banquette, a small open kitchen at the back.

Chef Jiří Štift, a Prague-trained alumnus of several of the country's most respected kitchens, runs a six-and-nine course tasting that draws almost entirely from a tight Bohemian radius. Spring brook trout cured with elderflower. Slow-cooked Cheb venison with juniper, lingonberry and bone-marrow purée. A signature course of beetroot in seven preparations that has become the line cooks tell you to try. The desserts lean savoury — sorrel, fennel pollen, smoked honey.

The wine programme is unusually serious for a town this size: deep Moravian whites (Pálava, Veltlínské Zelené), Czech orange wines, a tight Burgundian section and a thoughtful by-the-glass list. Pairings, at around 1,800 CZK, are a real bargain by European fine-dining standards.

Service is the quiet, technically excellent kind — multilingual, never hovering, properly informed on every plate. A nine-course dinner with pairings runs around 5,500 CZK per guest. For comparable cooking in Prague or Vienna you would be writing a much larger cheque.

Le Marché is the room you book in Karlovy Vary when the dinner has to do the work. The cooking is genuinely contemporary — not grand-hotel nostalgia — the room photographs cleanly without being theatrical, and a guest who has flown in for the spa or the festival leaves understanding that Czech fine dining is no longer a Prague-only conversation.