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In Magazine: what do Czech men and women expect on a first date? One Prague hotel now offers the services of a resident butler, President Zeman says no to a museum in his honour and the fashion of pop-up restaurants in private homes has arrived in the Czech Republic.

An American writer and journalist specialised in travel and food and drink (in particular beer), Evan Rail has been living in the Czech capital since the year 2000. For the last half decade, he’s called the city’s Petrské náměstí home; in this edition of My Prague, Rail shows me around his neighbourhood, which despite being only five minutes’ walk from Náměstí Republiky is still somewhat off the beaten path.

A recent survey of shopping habits by the KPMG agency suggests that organic food products have lost their initial attraction: shoppers find them too expensive and often question their superior quality. According to the results of the poll only 4 percent of Czechs buy organic food on a regular basis. 37 percent of respondents said they did so occasionally and approximately the same number of people said they had tried organic products in the past but no longer shopped for them. So are Czechs losing interest in organic food and should organic farmers

A boutique butcher’s called The Real Meat Society was established last year in Prague’s New Town. Since then, the small shop has become a popular stop for carnivores looking for meat from “happy” animals. With only three employees, the butcher’s sells one cow, some five pigs and two lambs a week that are processed from nose to tail, a concept that many Czech butchers seem to have forgotten. I sat down with one of the Real Meat Society’s founders Michaela Jorgensen and asked her about the shop’s philosophy.

Around 1,000 people received a free lunch on Prague’s Wenceslas Square on Tuesday in a campaign highlighting food waste. A group called Save Food handed out meals prepared from products that would otherwise have been discarded by supermarkets as they neared their expiry date. The ingredients were supplied by Makro and Tesco, the only supermarket chains cooperating with Czech food banks. The organizers said Czech legislation should allow retailers to hand out nearly expired foodstuffs to groups working with homeless and socially handicapped people.

They say there’s no such thing as a free lunch. However, on Tuesday hundreds of people lined up to receive just that in the centre of Prague, as part of an event aimed at highlighting the wasting of food both by supermarket chains and in the home.

The condition of a Czech tourist in hospital in Hurghada, Egypt, has improved and the man was able to leave the medical facility on Wednesday. His wife and eight-year-old daughter, however, died on Tuesday in as yet unclear circumstances. There has been speculation the cause of death may have been food poisoning. The man collapsed after finding his wife and daughter already dead in their room at the resort where they were staying, according to reports.

The hype over Western supermarkets of the 1990s started fading for Czechs sometime in the early noughties. As healthy eating became more of a priority for some Czech city dwellers, small organic food shops began cropping up in most cities. Organic was all the rage. Yet, many of the products sold in organic food shops were not locally grown, leaving a gap on the market for small and medium Czech farmers to fill.

Petra Pospěchová writes about all aspects of food for the business daily Hospodářské noviny. So when we met up for a tour of her favourite spots in Prague, it was no surprise that one of our destinations was Erhartova cukrárna, a 1930s confectionary. Pospěchová, who hails from Moravia, also took me to a smoky pub where former StB men rub shoulders with aging dissident types. But we started off by taking a little-known public cable car that runs from inside the Mövenpick Hotel in Smíchov up to the leafy Černý Vrch area, where my guide lives.

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.