U Medvídků: At the Little Bears
Why is it significant?
Look for the sign of the little bears on Na Perštýně, and peek through the doorway into the beer hall with its long wooden tables. On a winter evening it is one of the warmest rooms in Prague, and it has been pouring beer, by its own account, for more than five hundred years.
Key Facts
| Place | U Medvídků: At the Little Bears |
|---|---|
| Address | Na Perštýně 7, 110 00 Praha 1, Czechia |
| Geo Coordinates | 50.08290, 14.41870 |
| Part of Walk | Dark Lager and Dumplings: Prague's Historic Beer Halls & Food Markets |
| Generated | Generated |
Look for the sign of the little bears on Na Perštýně, and peek through the doorway into the beer hall with its long wooden tables. On a winter evening it is one of the warmest rooms in Prague, and it has been pouring beer, by its own account, for more than five hundred years.
U Medvídků, At the Little Bears, dates its brewing tradition to 1466. In medieval Prague, brewing was not an industry but a privilege attached to houses. Hundreds of burghers in the Old and New Towns had the right to brew, and the city was dotted with small house breweries, each with its malt floor, copper and cellar. Over the nineteenth century, big industrial breweries swallowed almost all of them. Brewing here stopped too, and the tavern survived by serving other people's beer.
In recent decades the little brewery came back to life on a small scale, and so the bears brew again. Around the tavern you can still sense the old Perštýn quarter, with Romanesque cellars hiding below street level. Many Old Town houses have their oldest rooms underground, because the medieval town raised its streets by several metres to escape the floods of the Vltava.
This is a good stop to talk about pub food. Czech beer halls were built for drinking, and the snacks are designed to keep you going: utopenci, which means drowned men, pork sausages pickled in vinegar with onions; nakládaný hermelín, a soft cheese marinated in oil with peppers and garlic; and smažený sýr, a thick slice of cheese fried in breadcrumbs and served with tartare sauce, the vegetarian option of every Czech childhood.
And if you hear people order a beer by its degrees, ten or twelve, that is not the alcohol. It is the old Czech measure of the malt sugar in the wort before fermentation, and Czech drinkers still choose by it. From here, walk down to Národní třída, cross it, and continue south through the side streets of the New Town to Křemencova. Listen for an accordion.