Prague - The 600-year old house at Boršov 2 has been bought and sold over the centuries by organ grinders, puppeteers, and tea makers, but it hardly shows its age.
Built in 1410 on one of the smallest streets in Old Town Prague, and a five-minute walk from Charles Bridge, the two-story house sits hidden on a left bend in the cobblestone road, an overhead sign marked "Lehká hlava" swinging quietly in the breeze.
The building's current owners, Vaclav Stanislav and Martin Dobes have made the blend of the ancient and the modern their main marketing tool: housed inside the preserved ancient interior of at Lehka Hlava (Clear Head) is one of only a handful of exclusively vegetarian restaurants in Prague.
Through the wooden front door of the restaurant and past the curtain hanging delicately just behind the entrance, vanilla-scented candles flicker light onto an intimate orange and red lounge, featuring a dinner table and cushion-covered couches and separated from the hallway by a glass door. To the left, an open bar showcases a colorful selection of fruit piled around the juice makers. The staff, Czechs in their early twenties, busy themselves with brewing tea or making juices from oranges, grapefruits, carrots, aloe vera, and the Brazilian berry called guarana, a fruit which contains a large percentage of natural caffeine, heralded by some as the elixir of enduring life.
Menu highlights include the soy-meat Bolognese pasta (130 crowns, about $6.50), vegetarian thai red curry with tofu, spring vegetables and rice (145 crowns), veggie burritos with pinto beans, avocado salad with goat cheese, tomato salsa, sour cream and rice (210 crowns), and a hearty selection of freshly squeezed juices.
Other selections include the bulgur risotto (135 crowns) with stir-fried tempeh, spring vegetables and sun-dried tomato in a peanut pesto sauce and the Pinto salad (115 crowns), a green leafy salad with refried beans, tomato salsa, sour cream and nachos. All prove to naysayers that vegetarian cuisine can be just as fulfilling as its meaty counterpart.
Some patrons make their way here at lunchtime, when they can enjoy one of the daily menus: a soup, a main dish and water, for 105 crowns. On Thursdays, for example, five 20 crown coins and a 5 crown will buy you bean soup with dill and smoked tofu and mushroom pasta baked with broccoli, cheese, tomatoes, and lettuce. On Wednesdays, the same amount will get you a vegetable soup with beetroot, green beans, and wild rice, and an entree of chickpea ragout with white radish, broccoli, and peppers, rice, buckwheat, and lettuce.
For dinner, the selection includes all of the restaurants offers of salads, soups, pastas and entrees, for a typical price of up to 160 crowns per entrée, like the eggplant quesadilla with cheese, guacamole and salsa, or a stir-fry with smoked tofu, ginger, spring vegetables, peanuts, and fresh coriander, served with rice.
Add another one of their whole-leaf teas or juices for up to 50 crowns, and you get to choose from an extensive menu featuring not only freshly made juices, but also interesting flavors such as soy milk with bourbon vanilla (45 crowns), birch juice (30 crowns), or aloe vera (35 crowns).
But it is the setting as much as the food that makes Lehka Hlava so appealing.
In the back room fish swim around a glass aquarium, pausing every now and then to glare nonchalantly at the wandering customer. By each of the windows, bamboo branches grow, intertwined in the soft candle light. Lehka Hlava has all the makings of a spa— that is, of course, apart from the fluffy bathrobes and the manicure and pedicure treatments.
The restaurant more than makes up for those lapses with a large selection of vegetarian meals and healthy drinks in a relaxed atmosphere. That and the restaurant's generally hospitable attitude make it a favorite with locals…and their canine friends. Leashes wind around the wooden chairs and doggy eyes stare up from between blue-jeaned legs even as the pet owners share a romantic dinner.
Lehka Hlava, besides being an open-kitchen vegetarian restaurant (with a fair share of vegan options), is also non-smoking and built and operated on the age-old principle of Sattva. Sattva is considered by Hindu philosophy to be one of the three basic components of the spiritual universe, alongside Raja and Tama.
While Raja represents action and passion and Tama stands for inertia and ignorance, Sattva is the nearest to divinity, representing purity, knowledge and enlightenment. With these ends in mind, Stanislav, Dobes and a few of their artist friends have created a restaurant they hope will "clear your head, sate your appetite, and delight your soul." In keeping with the restaurant's philosophy, ordained members of the clergy and other "enlightened persons" eat for free at this venue.
It also provides a much needed respite from the meat-lovers' paradise that is the Czech Republic.
According to a report by Radio Praha from 2005, the year Lehka Hlava was opened, each Czech consumed an average of 81 kilograms of meat that year, almost double the world average of 41kg/person. Out of the 81, 42 kilograms were pork, the Czechs' favorite meat. But statistics don't mean much to Stanislav and Dobes.
No matter the politics of their customers, whether life-long meatless, temporarily vegetarian, keeping Lent, or just curious about the menu, the owners are not here to convert. Their philosophy is simple. "We believe the world will be a better place if we stop increasing the consumption of meat," Stanislav and Dobes say.
The restaurant is always full. It seats about 48 people at any given time, and making reservations is highly recommended. It is a medium-sized locale, with seating in the lounge and two other rooms: the star room seats 20 people on comfortable couches, under a dome ceiling painted blue as the night sky and lit with hundreds of star lights; the back room features hand-painted lamps and stenciled walls, flowery white patterns strewn across the room over red wallpaper. In the background, music is always playing its dreams of a world far away, the selection alternating between the meditative tunes of Indian instrumental music and Buddha Bar-type lounge music from around the world.
Though the occasional tourist will sometimes wander in here, the restaurant is mostly frequented by locals, who look and feel at home on the soft couches and the sturdy wooden chairs.
The owners of this restaurant are catering to those who want to lead a healthier, low-stress lifestyle…and to the fish swimming in the aquarium tank who will always be on the receiving end of the feeding process here.
This story was originally published by the Prague Wanderer, a web-zine run by New York University students in Prague, Czech Republic.
Corina Maritescu is a third-year student at New York University studying journalism and gender and sexuality. She is from Bucharest, Romania.
