Esse

Oh, does it fell good when you’re done with all your exams in time! Especially when they are the last exams before the final exams after which we will be proud pan and pani Ing. Our last exam took place yesterday and of course we wanted to celebrate a bit. We were so exhausted that travelling somewhere was not in question for us, so we decided to stick to another neighborhood joint of ours – Esse.
Esse is one of these “Potrefena husa” style places, a better beer pub with a modern interior, a large selection of Staropramen brand beers and serving modern style cuisine. We have been there several times and actually liked it. Esse serves a very nice Svíčkova na smetaně, although my judging of Svíčkova may not be very accurate. As a non-Czech I, unfortunately, don’t have a babička to cook it for me, so I don’t really have a meter to judge it. We weren’t after Svíčkova this time though. And here is what we had:

Prawns with olive oil, ginger, garlic, served with toast.
The 4 prawns themselves were large and well cooked (even though they were clearly frozen, they weren't dry) but didn’t deserve to be drenched in bottled, overly sweet chilli sauce. There was some delicious cream cheese on the toast, I couldn’t identify it.

I had the chicken breast with mushroom ragout and potato šišky. The only flaw of this dish was the generous sprinkling of paprika on top the chicken breast. All in all this was one of the best chicken breasts I have recently eaten. It was plump and incredibly juicy. I don‘t think I have to explain how difficult it is to cook a chicken breast properly, without making it dry, which happens in the majority of restaurants. The mushroom sauce, I wouldn’t go as far as calling it a ragout, was tasty and there was no flour added to the sauce, which is always nice. I would order this dish any time again.

Husband’s steak with confit shallots and mashed potato. The steak was ordered medium, and it was cooked medium. I am not an expert on steaks, but husband said it was fine. It was served with a sweetish sauce (the confit shallot sauce perhaps?) and over the actual shallots. The shallots were white for some reason, which did not match with the sauce, and did not look too appetizing. The mashed potato was made from real potatoes and was well seasoned.

We had a couple of beers with our food and Richie the dog was offered a big pink bowl of water.
One thing I’d to like mention are the mistakes in the menu. I think that this is already the third menu they have here and it still has these stupid grammatical mistakes like blue chesse, fettucciene and others. Fettuccini is actually written two ways on one single page and both are wrong! I really can’t imagine how this is possible and it makes me think about how seriously the owner takes his business. It makes a very bad impression, which is a shame because the food is not bad at all and the service is good too.