Zvuky Prahy / Sounds of Prague

The Cafe Imperial is one of a handful of the famous pre-war cafés - temples to caffeine, creativity and conversation - left in Prague the Imperial was built in 1914. With its creamy tiles and Moorish mosaics, it is a great place to sit and watch the world - and the trams - go by. Like many Prague coffee houses, the Café Imperial has undergone something of a makeover in recent years. Gone is the dark and dismal interior, the indifferent service, and - a terrible shame this - the legendary doughnut bowl, whose stale contents could once be bought and pelted at fellow patrons for exactly 1,942 Czech crowns (just over 100 dollars), a homage to an incident in the classic 1942 novel Saturnin, a sort of Czech Jeeves and Wooster. Saturinin is a character from Zdenek Jirotka’s humorous novel bearing the name of its hero. Here people can be divided into three categories according to their reaction to a plate of doughnuts. Some just look at them, the others throw them only in their fantasy whereas the most daring group takes the plate and “gives the doughnuts wings” for a while before the target is met.