Czech & Slovak Family Restaurants

In the course of working on Recording Voices & Documenting Memories, food has been an important theme, and a good number of the people the National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library has spoken to have owned their own family restaurant, either here in the United States or in Europe prior to their departure.

Dusan Ciran’s stepfather, Emil Sarvady, owned a restaurant in the town of Senica, Western Slovakia, in the run up to WWII (the restaurant in question is pictured above, in more recent times). In this clip from Dusan’s interview with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories, he recalls serving German soldiers there during the War:



Robert Dobson, meanwhile, worked as a waiter (as well as a hair model) in Prague in the 1970s. When he came to Chicago with his family in 1984, he started working as a bartender in the city before buying Pilsner Restaurant in Berwyn three years later. He and his family ran the establishment for the next 13 years. In this clip from his interview, Robert remembers the most popular items on the menu:



Today, Robert runs a remodeling and construction firm based in Bolingbrook, Illinois.



Josef Tousek was a waiter and hotelier in Czechoslovakia before he came to Chicago in 1981. After working at Ciel Bleu French Restaurant in Chicago’s Mayfair Hotel for some years, he set up his own Alpine Banquet House, which now has two branches in the Greater Chicago Area. He shared photos of his restaurant on Roosevelt Road before and after reconstruction with Recording Voices & Documenting Memories:


Photos of Alpine Banquet House before and after renovation

Ales Vesely came to the United States in 1983. Today he works as a barman in Chicago’s Klas Czech Restaurant (where this photograph was taken):



Of Klas Restaurant and the neighborhood, Cicero, in which it is found, Ales says: “…It used to be all Czech over here. I remember we’d drive down Cermak Avenue and there would be Czech butcher shops, a bakery, other restaurants, Czech bars, even Polish places. And now you drive down Cermak Avenue and pretty much it’s all Spanish. This is the last Mohican on Cermak Road. I love this place, it’s very unique."