Antonín Kokeš is better known as the founder of Albi, the massive Czech board game and gift company, which makes his pivot into baking a genuine second act rather than a natural next step. Traveling through Germany and France, he kept running into a standard of neighborhood artisan bakery that Prague wasn't matching, and decided to build one himself. The mission was simple and stubborn: honest, scratch-made baking, no chemical improvers, no frozen pre-baked dough shortcuts.

The flagship location on Náměstí Míru carries a striking piece of history behind it, a building that once housed the legendary Café Republika during the First Republic era. Renovation work there uncovered original 19th-century wall murals by Valentin Skála depicting historic coffee and spice trade routes from the Orient, murals that had been painted over for decades before the bakery brought them back into view.

This review covers the location next to Mazelab rather than the flagship, so I can't speak to those murals firsthand. What I can speak to is the baking, and it delivered. We sat outside and split traditional kolaches that hit every register in one bite, fluffy, chewy, sweet and savory working together rather than against each other. This isn't a one-trick bakery either. Breads, sandwiches, soup, a genuinely solid rotation for breakfast and lunch. We packed sandwiches for a Czech road trip, and they held up perfectly for eating on the open road, which is its own kind of endorsement.