Haytham Al-Shori opens Pomalu pomalu bistro in Prague Vinohrady

Yemeni-born Haytham Al-Shori, who has lived in Prague for thirteen years, is expanding his culinary business: the team behind Kin & K Bakery has opened the bistro Pomalu pomalu in Vinohrady. Besides fresh pastries, it serves oysters, tartare and steaks.

As recently as early September, the corner of Slavíkova and Ondříčkova streets, just metres from náměstí Jiřího z Poděbrad, was a building site. Even so, almost four hundred guests crowded into the pre-opening. The response is no surprise: the Kin & K team knows not only how to bake bread but also how to create an atmosphere you want to be part of.

“I’m a foreigner, and communities are what we foreigners create in Prague,” Al-Shori laughs. He came to the Czech Republic as a student and worked with coffee and baked goods from the very start. He gave the local food scene not only the Kin & K brand with its cardamom braids but also the roastery Tribes of Mokha. He roasts the coffee himself and is not eager to man the stove: during covid, together with two friends, he launched the bakery as a manager.

The name came from the closeness of the founders: “kin” means relatives in English, and K is the first letter of the name of their shared cat, Koi. The first branch opened in the Harfa shopping centre in Vysočany, and about a year later a small branch followed on Korunní, close to Al-Shori’s home and the new bistro. The bakery itself is now based at Harfa, and sales there are excellent, but in his words the sense of community does not quite work: “it’s still a shopping centre.” On Korunní, by contrast, everything is to his taste, and he hopes it will be the same here.

The kitchen at Pomalu pomalu is run by young chef Jakub Hais, who has worked in Michelin-starred restaurants abroad, at Prague’s La Degustation and at Bistro Karel. For breakfast there is bread with cottage cheese and egg, and stracciatella with plums, peaches and shiso; for dinner, oysters, beef tartare, steak or schnitzel. The wines are natural, from around the world. The menu is planned to change every month. “We simply love good food and want to show that we know how to cook it,” says Al-Shori.

You may already have tasted his bakery’s bread without knowing it: Kin & K Bakery supplies a number of well-known Prague venues, including Café Slavia, Louvre and SmetanaQ, as well as the neighbouring Cafefin and Blumery. The last two are also competitors of the new bistro, but Al-Shori is not too worried: “It’s a cliché, but I believe in our place, otherwise I couldn’t do this. From the beginning we tried to do our best, and we always found our people.”

The name Pomalu pomalu (“slowly, slowly”) also came from experience. The renovation and preparation took almost two years, something kept breaking, and he went around repeating: “just slowly.” It became an inside joke, and then the team realised the name perfectly captures their approach: don’t rush.