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At Bohemian Spirit, the Meals of Czech Memory
Bohemian Spirit
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- Bohemian Spirit
- Eastern European
- $$
- 321 East 73rd Street, Yorkville
- 212-861-1038
A hidden door in the wall sprang open one night at Bohemian Spirit in Yorkville on the Upper East Side. Through it strode a man with a froth of white beard, bearing down on my table with open arms.
He spoke in Czech, once the language of the surrounding streets, when immigrants from Central Bohemia worked at the local cigar factories by day and staged plays and talked literature by night. They may have gathered over meals much like this, eating strong red sausage roasted in dark beer, and sourdough rye in slabs, rubbed with fat teardrops of garlic.
Another trick of the eye: two cuts of chuck roast, dwarfed by dumplings that look like pale, floppy slices of bread. These prove to be dense sponges confected from yeast and Wondra — whose textural effect is the closest the kitchen can get to using the traditional mix of coarse and semicoarse Czech flours — and bolstered by diced sourdough rye.
The dumplings sop up a sea of heavy cream sauce so thick it verges on custard. Its sharp yellow hue comes from carrots braised to near disintegration. Moored on the side is half a lemon smeared with cranberry preserves under a burl of whipped cream. It is an entree stealing from the wardrobe of dessert, and in Americans may trigger memories of Thanksgiving.
Bohemian Spirit opened in April on the ground floor of the 120-year-old Bohemian National Hall, a 75-foot-wide palazzo with fluted columns rising from lions’ heads. The building, a decrepit hulk, was taken over by the Czech Republic in 2001 and restored. The Czech consulate is now upstairs.
Lukas Pohl, the chef, grew up in Cerveny Kostelec, a small town near the Czech-Polish border. He has worked in high-end kitchens in Prague and at Hospoda, the Czech restaurant that once occupied this space; its delicately orchestrated, diminutive dishes somewhat belied its name, which translates as “pub.”
At Bohemian Spirit, every item on the first page of the menu — snacks, soups, appetizers — is $6, and on the second, no entree rises above $19. In lieu of Hospoda’s red cabbage “essence,” there is simply red cabbage, shredded and ingloriously heaped, sour and sweet. It makes a bed for a knobby duck leg, slow-cooked with caraway seeds and more delicious than beautiful.
A plank of Muenster arrives fried like schnitzel, with a crackly shield of bread crumbs and woozy guts. This is street food in Prague, dressed with tartar sauce, sometimes piped right in. Here it’s kept demurely to the side, and the usual pairing of French fries is forsworn for fingerling potatoes. (“French fries aren’t Czech,” Mr. Pohl said.)
Vit Stuchl, the owner, runs two restaurants in Prague, including a Texan-style steakhouse called Crazy Cow. Here his mission is nostalgic nourishment, which means schnitzel with golden crevices and slightly paprika-shy goulash, redeemed by rough potato pancakes tinged with marjoram.
This is fine fare for absorbing tankards’ worth of Pilsner Urquell and BrouCzech Dark, both on tap. Even salad comes with beer, a basal tone in the vinaigrette. And even salad is a vehicle for meat, the leaves draped with rosy scraps of Prague-style ham.
At Hospoda, Mr. Pohl’s desserts were artful compositions. Now he offers unfussed-over plates of apple strudel and prunes cradled inside little copper-topped buns. I cut the sugar with a shot of slivovitz, sharp and clean on the tongue and fire in the ribs.
It’s odd, and oddly charming, to be served beer-hall food by no-nonsense waitresses in such a lofty room, with walnut herringbone floors held over from its Hospoda days and winged pendant lights like a flock of Modernist sea gulls. The walls are papered with black-and-white portraits of Czech icons: the writer and dissident Vaclav Havel, the figure skater Aja Zanova, a stack of bentwood Thonet chairs.
In one photograph stand a bride and groom, from a wedding in the ballroom above, in 1946. “Those are my parents,” a diner told Mr. Stuchl one evening.
As for the bearded man who emerged from the wall, it turned out that he didn’t work for the restaurant. (Mr. Stuchl suspects that it was someone involved in the Bohemian Benevolent and Literary Association upstairs.) When we failed to understand his greeting, he gave a half-bow, as if tipping an invisible hat.
Soon he was leading the next table in what sounded, from its vigor, like a Czech drinking song. We could only listen, wistfully, wishing we knew the words.
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