Czech beef tartare with fried garlic toasts: hand-chopped raw beef sirloin pounded with mustard, paprika, raw egg yolk and onion, scooped onto a slab of toasted rye rubbed with garlic, eaten with a cold Pilsner.

Tatarak entered Bohemian cuisine through Habsburg-era links with the German-speaking lands, where Beefsteak Tatar was a fashionable bourgeois plate by the 1880s. The Czech version diverged into a pivnice classic: rough hand-chopped (never machine-minced) beef from the Czech rump or sirloin, mixed at the table with paprika, mustard, ketchup, finely chopped onion, capers, anchovy and an egg yolk in the central well. The toasted topinka (slice of rye fried in lard, rubbed hot with raw garlic) is the obligatory accompaniment. Kantyna, the McConnell-style butcher-cafe of Ambiente group, modernised the dish but kept the form. The combination is sometimes called pivni dieta (beer diet) because the salt and protein call for round after round of cold lager.

4 editor picks for Tatarak s topinkami in Prague, ranked by editorial score. All Prague signature dishes · Tatarak s topinkami across every city.