Prague Just Paid Into Michelin. The Food Is Still Mediocre.

The Czech Republic recently paid its way into the Michelin Guide. You can tell, because now there are small Michelin plaques appearing outside restaurants across Prague. The plaques are very shiny. The food, in many cases, has not changed.

This is not a complaint exactly. It is an observation.

I live in Prague. I have cooked professionally on four continents, produced events for A-list clients and culinary tastemakers, and spent a significant portion of my adult life thinking about how food moves through culture. Prague is a beautiful city. Its food scene is, with some notable exceptions, a loop.

The loop goes like this: a new restaurant opens. It serves Napoleon pizza, or pho, or a "modern European" tasting menu with beet spherification and a foam that nobody ordered. You go once. You understand immediately why it exists. You do not go back.

Then another one opens.

There is a specific phenomenon I have started calling the Indian restaurant argument. I have had this argument in multiple establishments, always with the same structure and always the same ending.

I order something. It arrives sweet. Not aromatic-sweet, not tamarind-sweet, but sugared, with a coconut gravy that has no geographical origin I can identify. I say something. The owner explains that if I wanted it spicy, I should have ordered the butter chicken. I explain, with the patience of someone who has had this conversation before, that I lived in India. That butter chicken is not the spicy option. That what has arrived is not chicken tikka masala in any form I have encountered in the country that invented it.

The argument escalates. At some point, I switch partially into Hindi. The hand gestures arrive shortly after. I have, apparently, absorbed enough from years of living in India and being married into an Indian family to deploy the full dramatic register of an old uncle who has been deeply wronged.

Across the table, my Indian husband watches all of this. He does not intervene. He is laughing too hard to intervene.

When it is over, he says: "You know you're never going to win this."

He is, technically, correct. But I maintain that the argument is worth having.

I want to be clear: I am not expecting authenticity as a museum piece. Food travels, adapts, evolves. That is what food does and has always done. What I am objecting to is something more specific. It is the systematic softening of a cuisine until it no longer resembles itself, then serving it to a market that has never been given the chance to encounter the real thing and therefore cannot know what it is missing.

Which brings me to the influencers.

Prague has a particular ecosystem of food content creators, a certain type, common to expat communities in mid-sized European cities, who have built audiences around the premise of knowing where to eat. Some of them are American. Several of them I have known personally.

I have sat across from some of these people. I have heard, in private, their actual opinions of the restaurants they post about. The assessments are not favorable. The posts are.

What their followers do not always know is that the glowing recommendation came with a free meal, a fee, or both. And that arrangement is not disclosed. Someone sees the post. They go. They order the thing. They have been primed to expect an experience, and so they construct one. They tell their friends it was incredible.

I have been to the same restaurant. I know what the food tastes like. I also know what was left unsaid.

This matters beyond the obvious ethical problem of undisclosed advertising. It matters because taste is not fixed. It is calibrated by exposure and expectation. When the dominant food narrative in a city is written by people who are paid to be enthusiastic, the city's collective sense of what is good quietly adjusts downward. Standards erode not through any single bad meal but through the accumulated weight of meals that were told, convincingly, that they were excellent.

The restaurant gets the customers. The influencer gets the fee. The diner gets a story to tell at dinner parties. And the city gets a slightly worse understanding of what food can be.

The clearest evidence that this is a supply problem, not a demand problem, is what happens when I leave Prague.

My husband and I travel regularly. When we arrive at a hotel in another European city, one of the first things I do is open the delivery apps to see what is available. It is a reflex. It is also, increasingly, a study in contrast.

In Warsaw: Indo-Chinese. In Milan: Sri Lankan, Maldivian, Nigerian, Ethiopian. A kind of United Colors of Benetton in food representation, the full breadth of what a city with real culinary ambition looks like when it stops apologising for complexity.

Also in Milan: I ordered a sushi omakase to the room. It arrived at a fraction of what a mediocre roll costs in Prague. The packaging was architectural. Each piece was placed with the same attention you would expect at a sit-down omakase in Los Angeles or New York or Dubai. I ate it on a hotel bed and felt genuinely moved, which is either the correct response to excellent sushi or a sign that I have been in Prague too long.

In Prague, the same apps show the same options. Pizza. Pho. The aforementioned sweet chicken.

Here is what makes this interesting rather than merely frustrating: Prague has every structural condition needed for a genuinely exciting food scene. A beautiful city with serious tourism. A growing expat population with international palates. A culinary history, Czech, Austro-Hungarian, Jewish, that is rich and, in the right hands, genuinely extraordinary. U Kalendu does it. A Czech restaurant with a modern sensibility, it is the one place I send every guest without hesitation. But one restaurant carrying the weight of an entire cuisine is not a food scene. It is an exception.

The bones are there. What is missing is someone deciding that the market can handle it. And a media ecosystem honest enough to tell people the truth about what they are eating.

The Michelin plaques are a start, I suppose. Though I notice they are very shiny.

This is, ultimately, why I stopped going out to eat in Prague and started hosting dinner at home instead. Not as a hobby. As a response. Tourists fly in from around the world and book a seat at my table because they have read the reviews and made a calculation: it will be better than anything available at the top restaurants in the city. They are not wrong. And the fact that a private home has become a more reliable destination for serious food than the establishments with the shiny new plaques says everything that needs to be said about the state of things.

Mariko Amekodommo is a culinary experience designer and strategic advisor to food and hospitality brands. She works globally across gastronomy, culture, and brand.