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Czech inspectors have found that more than half the restaurants they checked up on discriminated against foreign clients. The inspectors from the Czech Commercial Inspectorate found that eight out of 13 restaurants they checked up on added extra charges to the bills of foreign customers compared with Czechs. Agents went undercover for the inspections by pretending they could only speak English. Other shortcomings were found at nine out of the 13 restaurants. The inspectorate pointed out that Prague is highly reliant on tourists with the aim that they should be treated fairly and not exploited. The inspectorate said it would continue checks throughout the tourist season and beyond because restaurants also served ex-pats living in Prague.

Anyone who has ever visited a restaurant in the US will have noticed and likely apprecaited the availability of free tap water with their meals. The practice, according to internet daily iDNES, appears to have caught on in some Czech restaurants with a caveat or two - namely that you often have to ask if you want to receive. Tap water usually isn't offered as a matter of course and is rarely mentioned in the menu. Or if it is, it isn't free.

Few people are as qualified to provide an insider’s tour of the Moravian capital as Michal Kašpárek, author of the guidebook Poznej Brno (Get to Know Brno). On a warm evening recently, Kašpárek took me to a hopping pub in the city and a former “workers’ colony” taken over by alternative types. But we started out at a table outside Café Falk, near the university’s Arts Faculty.

Petra Pospěchová’s recently published Regionální Kuchařka, or Regional Cookbook, is full of interesting recipes from around the Czech Republic, from her native Valašsko in the east of the country to the former Sudetenland in the west and all points in between, with each section introducing readers to a dozen or so local specialities. When I met Pospěchová, one of the country’s best-known food writers, I asked her if it had perhaps taken somebody from outside Prague to put together such a book.

In our age of celebrity chefs and cookbooks for all skill levels and wallet sizes, we may sometimes forget that food was an important element of life surrounded by special rituals, beliefs and values for many a decade. In this edition of Czech Life I decided to find out what importance food had a hundred or so years ago in this region. In order to do that, I headed to the ethnographic department of the Czech National Museum, where the exhibit Krmě - jídlo – žrádlo, or Dish-Meal-Grub is currently on display.

In Magazine: what do Czech men and women expect on a first date? One Prague hotel now offers the services of a resident butler and the fashion of pop-up restaurants in private homes has arrived in the Czech Republic.

One old proverb goes: “The way to a man's heart is through his stomach”. It may be true, that good cooking can win a man’s love. The pastry chef Iveta Fabešová believes that when it come to women, it is the cooking itself that can bring them closer together. The author of a number of popular cookbooks, Iveta decided to test out this hypothesis in a new multi-media, and multi-flavored, project Mothers and Daughters, or Matky a dcery in Czech.

Several restaurants in central Prague were among two dozen eateries fined last year for severe breaches of consumer legislation. The Czech Trade Inspection Authority found that nearly 40 percent of restaurants inspected broke the law; the most frequent problems include short measures of beer and other drinks, overcharging, as well as automatically including tips in bills without the guests’ knowledge.

Tram and car traffic is heavy on Prague’s Dukelských Hrdinů St. – not a very inviting location to open a business in the middle of the financial crisis. Yet the 45-year-old cook gone entrepreneur Petr Kosiner has set up his store Lázníčkový knedlík here. It is the only brick-and-mortar shop in Prague to sell homemade dumplings. Since it opened seven months ago, the store and the humble goods it sells have turned out to be so popular that already its owner has a hard time keeping up with the huge demand. Both restaurant professionals and regular

Blanka Milfaitová’s famous marmalade mini-manufacture is a dream come true. Her jams, produced in a small village in the Šumava mountains have won her the title of the World’s Best Artisan Marmalade Maker, the 2013 gold medal at the World Marmalade Awards and the Double Gold Star at the Great Taste Awards. Right now Blanka is on a European Marmalade Expedition making marmalade from local produce in 35 countries around Europe.