Avant-Guide Prague: Insiders Guide to Progressive Culture

This book is dead on. We were in Prague for four days, and this book was an indispensible tool. The bar/club descriptions were honest, straight-forward and written as if by a friend who had been living there for six years. Beyond merely naming a bar, giving an address and some surface description, they go in depth, including what nights to visit which place. The restaurant descriptions were fantastic, and lead us to some of the best (and best priced) meals we had on the trip. The mapping system makes navigation remarkably easy. Get this book, go to Prague, and rest assured you will have a good time.

I must say that I'm VERY impressed with this guide for Prague. I've been a frequent visitor to the city for the past couple of years, and am FINALLY moving there this summer. This guidebook is great because it provides inside information for visitors like me-- people who don't want to look like tourists and want to take in the best of local culture and nightlife-- people who would rather try and speak even a little of the local language czech than flock to English speaking tourist traps.

We have just returned from a trip to Prague and Vienna. This guide to Prague was absolutely invaluable and the best by far of any guide we used. Visiting Vienna afterwards, we sorely wished that they had written one on that city, too; the other travel resources we used were not nearly as complete or informative as your guide had been for Prague. We look forward to the publication of additional Avant guides in the future!

One of the biggest problems about visiting another city is that, unless you know somebody there, your chances of finding your way into the local "scene" are about nil. I've tried TimeOut, which has a few bars and event listings, but other than the 1% chance that there's a concert you like right then, it's pretty unhelpful. Avant-Guide is the answer, as far as I'm concerned, steering you away from (in Prague) huge touristy places like Karlovy Lazne, "a teen-tourist club on four floors for those who don't know anyplace better to go." It has paragraph-long descriptions of 79 bars and clubs, detailing not only the music and decor but, more significantly, the crowd, the vibe, and the fact that "nobody we know has ever gotten laid here." Owning this bar is like having a best friend who's lived in the city for a dozen years and has done nothing but look for a "spectacular after-hours DJ bar that just gets going at 3am and hits its stride hours later." Of course, there are other sections. The Restaurants section is equally good, even if it tends to favor restaurants out of the average twentysomething's budget. Ditto 20 pages on "boutique hotels." The weakness, other than occasionally MTV-cool writing, is the Sights section, tellingly placed at the back, which gives a rudimentary paragraph to places that a Frommer's or Michelin might have written a chapter on. But if you're traveling with friends rather than family, you probably won't care: you'll be recovering from the best nightlife you've ever had.