A green Michelin star inspired Prague’s first vegetarian fine dining

Bára Šimůnková and Michal Bílek, the owners of Prague restaurant Leaf, have taken a radical step: turning their establishment into the Czech Republic’s first vegetarian fine-dining restaurant by dropping meat altogether. The decision had been brewing throughout the restaurant’s five years in business, and the final push came when Leaf won a green Michelin star for sustainability.

Leaf is located in Prague’s Strašnice district, away from the tourist centre, so at first the restaurant relied almost entirely on local regulars. That changed after the first Michelin guide for Czechia was published. “For all five years, we maybe had one tourist a week. After the Michelin guide came out, bookings started coming in every day. People were often specifically looking for a vegetarian tasting menu — and few restaurants offer one,” says chef Šimůnková.

Meat had already played a minor role at Leaf, but the owners only decided to cut it out entirely now, inspired by the green star for sustainability. “We were hoping for it. From the very beginning we’ve been running Leaf the way few others do: we sort kitchen waste, minimise plastic, compost, do our own laundry, and use eco-friendly detergents and reusable packaging,” the chef lists.

Šimůnková brought many of these practices from the Praktika bakery, which she herself calls “the three-Michelin-star equivalent among bakeries.” Yet neither an ordinary guest nor a Michelin inspector would learn all the kitchen’s details unless they asked. “Our advantage is that it’s just the two of us running the restaurant, so we can give every guest our full attention. If we sense interest, we naturally talk about our approach over dinner,” explains Bílek, who runs the dining room.

The switch to an entirely vegetarian menu was originally planned only for January, after Michelin’s second season in Czechia, in hopes of confirming the green star. But Michelin scrapped the award altogether this year, and the owners — despite worrying they might come across to guests as an “esoteric” place — decided not to wait and made the switch already in summer.

The response so far has been excellent, though foreign guests often remark that the restaurant is “ahead of its time” and that the Czech public isn’t quite ready for it yet. “We knew this step would either give us a boost or bury us,” the two owners say.

Beyond its working processes, Leaf places enormous emphasis on the quality and origin of its ingredients — what matters is not so much organic certification as personal relationships with specific farmers: aubergines and pattypan squash from Jitka Pichová, eggs from the Kiselov family, dairy from Struhy, sea buckthorn from her grandfather’s garden. “We personally know all our farmers, and we need to share the same values. I don’t want the same order every week — I want whatever they have right now, even if it’s surplus that we then have to process,” says Šimůnková, who sometimes changes the menu several times a week.

The menu can even change within a single evening: once a dish runs out, it’s replaced with a new one so guests always get the freshest option. Each recipe is built from five components and goes through dozens of steps — the summer courgette lasagne, for example, takes four days to prepare and requires at least twenty steps.