Casa De Carli

Casa De Carli is the Italian restaurant Prague has always wanted but could never quite produce until Matteo De Carli and his wife Lenka Hermanová opened it in 2012. For a decade it operated as a cult address shared between in-the-know Pragers and diplomats; in the 2025 Michelin Guide it was finally handed the star it had quietly earned many years before. The recognition did nothing to change the cooking. It only made the reservation harder.

The setting on Vězeňská 5, a quiet street in Prague's Josefov district just off the Old-New Synagogue, is deliberately restrained. A small, straightforward, modern dining room with an open show kitchen, a walk-in wine fridge as the only real ornament, and tables spaced closely enough that you can hear the pasta being pulled. The room seats perhaps forty. There is no attempt at grandeur; the cooking makes any further architecture unnecessary.

The kitchen's bias is subtly northern Italian — Emilia-Romagna rhythms, Piedmontese seriousness about wine, a Venetian touch here and there — but everything is made in house. The breads, the pastas, the ice creams all come from the same kitchen that plates your dinner. Guests choose between five-, six- and seven-course tasting menus; the shorter version is already generous. Signature dishes include a spaghetti cacio e pepe that arrives under a cap of beef tartare, delicate homemade ravioli whose fillings change by season, and, at dessert, a tiramisu prepared tableside and a chocolate cigar presented with enough theatre that the room invariably turns to watch.

The wine list leans Italian, unsurprisingly, but the team will happily guide you through Moravian whites and Austrian reds when the mood calls for it. Service is precise, unfussy, and entirely in the hands of people who have worked together for years. This is not a restaurant where the waiter recites the menu like a hostage reading a script; it is a restaurant where the waiter will tell you which of the pastas is at its best that night, and mean it.

The room is quiet, warm, and entirely focused on the food. Light wood, neutral walls, the low hum of a kitchen that knows what it is doing. There is no music battling the conversation, no designer lighting turning faces amber. The open kitchen is the only real piece of theatre, and it runs with the calm rhythm of a team that has been together for more than a decade.

Lenka Hermanová runs the floor with the kind of hospitality that makes first-time guests feel like regulars within minutes. That warmth is the secret ingredient and it is not something Michelin bothers to grade.