Gemüse Corner founders open new Ünd bakery and café in Prague

Antonín Walter and Filip Urban, founders of Gemüse Corner Kebab, the famous Prague chain that draws queues in Podolí, have decided to try something new — they've opened a craft bakery and café called Ünd in Letná.

The place sits right next to one of their kebab branches and is tiny — just three round tables and a wooden bench. But the founders' ambition is bigger than the space: rather than competing with Prague's countless ordinary bakeries, they wanted to offer something genuinely different.

“We knew that, just like with the kebab, we wouldn't be alone on the market with pastries either. There's a bakery in every Prague neighbourhood now, and people won't cross the whole city for one. So from the start our goal was to come up with something that would set us apart,” Walter explains.

The bakery deliberately avoids competing with its neighbours: where others nearby make traditional Czech koláče and curd buns, Ünd goes the other way — crisp croissants, laminated dough, Italian focaccia and dense sourdough bread.

Getting there wasn't easy. Urban trained as a builder and once taught himself kebab recipes from online videos. Something similar happened with the new bakery's baker, Anina Ondráková, a graduate in printing who — despite taking a course with well-known pastry chef Helena Fleglová — initially struggled to get the recipes right in practice. An experienced baker named Zina saved the day just before the opening, setting up the process and training the team.

The menu currently has eight items, which the owners plan to refresh roughly every two months — from Danish tebirkes with marzipan and poppy seed to cinnamon monkey bread. Among the sweet items there's always one savoury product tied to the kebab business — for instance, a pastry filled with Gemüse Corner's signature ajvar sauce.

The bakery and the kebab business share one production facility: the same kitchen bakes the flatbreads and buns for the kebabs, as well as around twenty loaves of sourdough bread a day for Ünd. “It makes sense this way — we didn't have to build a new bakery, we can just use the existing capacity,” Urban says.

The partners are adamant about growing the business without borrowed money. “We reinvest the profit. We save up, and when we have the money, we buy things. We don't take out loans, we don't borrow. We don't believe in the American approach of running a business on money that isn't yours,” Urban says.

For the founders, Ünd is a kind of test run for a new direction: if the concept catches on — and customer interest is already there — they plan to open more locations, following the model of their kebab chain, which currently has four branches: in Podolí, Vinohrady, Letná and Karlín, the last of which will fully return to their own management from August after being run as a franchise.