Chef David Reichon turns Prague hotel restaurant into a food find

David Reichon, chef at Prague’s Marriott hotel, has walked away from the usual hotel-kitchen role and turned the Artisan restaurant into a project with a character all its own — built on farm produce, fermentation and a rooftop garden. Now he wants it discovered not just by tourists, but by Praguers themselves.

The story began with an attempt to keep hold of a talented chef. Reichon, who had worked at the Marriott in Saigon, Vietnam, as well as at the Czech restaurants Zátiší Group and White Circus (Ambiente), was on the verge of leaving the Prague Marriott during its renovation. The hotel’s then chief operating officer, Hector Pliego, came in person to Reichon’s kitchen in the Nekázanka district to persuade him to stay. The deciding argument was an offer of full creative freedom, instead of continuing to run the standard Midtown Grill.

Given carte blanche by management, Reichon built the kitchen around his own ideas: fermenting produce, growing herbs and vegetables in the hotel’s patio, and using honey from beehives on the building’s roof. For a large hotel chain, that approach is rare, and it required equipment investments the chef had to justify to management.

Reichon stresses that, despite the creative freedom, he carefully tracks costs and makes sure the money invested pays off. The hotel’s scale gives him resources, infrastructure and financial means a small independent restaurant simply doesn’t have — but in exchange, he has to follow corporate rules.

A telling example of his philosophy is the orange peel left over from squeezing fresh juice for breakfast. Reichon’s team learned to candy it and fold it into house-made granola, which guests can pick up at the hotel’s Coffee Corner. In his view, a use can be found for almost any ingredient in the kitchen — sometimes it just takes time to find it.

Reichon plans his menus and orders to minimise waste as early as the purchasing and storage stage. The restaurant’s composter closes the loop: for instance, farmer Stanislav Hecht, who supplies Artisan with tomatoes and peppers, likely grows them using compost produced by that same kitchen. Many of the chef’s supplier relationships date back to his time at White Circus and continue to this day.

Reichon’s style was shaped heavily by six years spent in Asia, where he studied methods of preserving and fermenting food and learned a deep respect for every ingredient — a principle that now defines the whole concept behind Artisan.