JOSEFOV

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Hello again, after what has been a year's break from my strolls around Prague and my review of what little treasures that I discovered. I never intended for the break to be so long but then I had forgotten just how much time and effort a new born child consumes, so here we are a year on and my little boy Samuel is about to celebrate his first birthday and what an appropriate way to begin by walking around the Jewish Quarter which after all the time that I have been living in Prague, always thought was a part of Old Town but I was wrong, it is in fact its own area and surprisingly dates back to the 10th century.

My SVG spent most of the day trying to dig up some interesting facts about the Jewish quarter apart from the most obvious things such as it has the most exclusive shopping street in Prague and that the longest living resident is a figure modeled by a Rabbi and whose main purpose was to keep the people of the Jewish quarter safe, she tried to find facts that most people didnt know and the most interesting of these were that the history of this quarter went all the way back to the 10th century and through history the life for the inhabitants of the smallest cadastral district was very turbulent. The Jews in Prague were also the first of the Jewish communities to use the Star of David as a symbol of their community and the last little tit bit that she unearthed was that Parizska was modeled on the Champs Elysee though looking at it today it is very hard to imagine how it would of looked like completed.

If you want more information on the tourist sights you can go to the website www.jewishmuseum.cz and you should find all the relevant information.

Review

As most of the restaurants in the Jewish quarter were out of our price range we found the James Dean restaurant on the edge of Josefov and the Old Town district and decided to settle for this one and also it is very colourful and pleasing to the eye with all those 50's iconic images leaping up and out the window towards you as you walk past.

When we walked into the restaurant it reminded me of the Frosty Palace in the movie Grease which as a kid I can admit to going to see more than 8 times. We sat down at our table and all around were images from the 50's especially not surprisingly James Dean and even his iconic Porsche Spyder.

The girls were of course dressed for the part and the menu was as you might expect from having watched lots of American movies full of burgers, steaks, shakes and bakes. Being very hungry I went for the James Dean burger which was on special offer but still more expensive than the rest of the burgers and didn't seem to offer much more in the way of ingredients and my SVG had the chicken burger.

The girls were very colourful, sexy, polite and friendly and even though we were too early for the lunch menu they let us eat from it, which was a big plus. Concerning the food, my SVG was very pleased with her chicken burger but I was disappointed with my 200g James Dean burger which turned out to be 2 100g pre-cooked possibly frozen burgers and not a nice prime beefburger made from quality fresh ingredients into a 200g monster burger that I was expecting, but it all looked good and our general feeling about the place was that it was a lot of fun and for someone who doesn't like going to the toilets, I loved the toilets at The James Dean Restaurant, they are so much fun.

We would go there again for sure but I wouldn't have another burger unless they started cooking real burgers. It is a fun friendly place during the day and at night time I guess it rocks like Hard rocks I imagine.