Na Spilce

Decent food, decent service, good (and cheap) beer.
Na Splice is the restaurant on the grounds of the Pilsner Urquell brewery complex (which is absolutely massive in size), and it too is massive. It looks unassuming from the outside, but the basement dining rooms are huge. We were on a tour bus, one of about ten in the parking lot when we arrived, and they have separate dining room and a limited menu for the tour busses so that the kitchen doesn’t get slowed down too much. The food was perfectly decent Czech; I liked the chicken noodle soup as a starter, and the bread dumplings were quire good, but my sirloin pieces were a bit small and not super tender. As a closer, the sweet rolls (one with plum filling and one with something like marscapone) were a nice size and not too sweet. The real plus was the pretty cheap and good beer; a roughly pint-​sized serving was less than € 2, which wasn’t bad at all.
If you’re on a tour of the brewery Na Splice is decent enough, but I wouldn’t drive out of my way just to eat here.

Nette Stimmung aber sehr unmotivierter Service. Das Essen war in Ordnung. Das Bier lecker. Aber der Service war SEHR schlecht.

Wir sind mit ca. 200 Personen hier eingefallen. die Räumlichkeiten befinden sich im Kellergewölbe der Brauerei Pilsener Urquell. die Getränkebestellung ging sehr schnell, da wirklich ausreichend Kellner vorhanden waren. Der erste Hunger wurde aus dem Brotkorb gestillt. Suppe als Vorspeise war gut. Die Hauptgerichte kamen leider nicht zeitgleich an den Tisch, aber bei der Anzahl an Gästen auch kaum zu schaffen. an der großen Salatplatte gibt es nichts auszusetzen. Ebenso an den Fleischgerichten. Nur die tschechischen Serviettenknödel sind hier anders, als man sie kennt… im Großen und Ganzen ist der Laden nicht verkehrt, aber natürlich nicht Sterne verdächtig.

Sometimes, I feel like a modern day Nostradamus with all my eerily accurate predictions.
Like the time I came here and as soon as I ate this piece of raw green pepper that tasted like concentrated body odor and earwax, I declared right at the table, with all my friends as witness: If I die in the next 48 hours, it’s because of this poison pepper Na Spilce just fed me.
Just a few more of my future predictions for the sake of posterity…
* A large volcanic explosion is going to take place somewhere in the world in the first half of 2014. It’s gon’ be a biggie. Like, one for the books, for sure.
* If I die today, it’s because I tried to cook myself eggs, things went awry, parts of them may have still been raw, I didn’t want to get up again and finish cooking them, I ate them anyway.
Now back to Na Spilce…
What d’ya know… by the end of the day I was violently barfing my brains out (like, I thought I burst a blood vessel in my eye) in our hotel bathroom while all my friends sat 4 feet away waiting, cringing, listening to me splash bits of that green pepper (which tasted the same coming up as it did going in) into the far depths of the toilet bowl basin.
Rowlfing in the Czech Repubic, as you can imagine, was not a high point for me.
If you’re doing the Pilsner Urquell brewery tour, this is the resto on campus and you’ll probably end up going here… at least if you go on a Sunday because most things in this town were either closed on Sunday or closed for good, also because the tour is a healthy 3 hours long and there’s a teensy bit of drinking involved so it’s only natural that hunger would ensue, and because on the tour you’ll get a token for one free beer here.
The place is huge and actually looks really nice. You’ll get the same disgruntled service that you’d get at the pub in the main town square that serves pretty much the exact same menu right down to having the same clip art on the menu pages. We’d eaten at the twin menu place the night before where I got the same salmon entrée and it was surprisingly good so for that reason I ordered it again here… also there’s was only one vegetarian thing on the menu and it sounds kind of nurst. The salmon here was much drier and not worth the even nominal price tag of $ 12-​ish dollars.
Where I went wrong was ordering their side house salad that actually looked really great, and also tasted pretty decent… besides that one, single green pepper bite, that ended up tearing up my esophageal region.
If you can avoid getting sucked in beyond cashing in on your free beer, I strongly suggest you do that.