The Truth About Nightlife in Prague

The Truth About Nightlife in Prague

Prague is famous for its castles and cobblestone streets, but did you know it’s one of the only cities in Europe where you can still order authentic absent at the bar? I’m getting ahead of myself. You can’t trip up to speed. Last week, Mackenzie and I saw a lot of Prague by foot. We did two different walking tours covering Oldtown, crossing the Charles Bridge to see the impressive world record holding castle complex. And this week, we’re diving a little deeper into the hidden parts that make Prague so unique. So where was Oh yeah absent. It has a significant history here in Prague. It was originally brought here by artists who were exposed to it in Paris. And unlike some countries in Western Europe, the production and consumption of absin was never banned. There was definitely a pause in production during the communist period. But in the 1990s, there was a big resurgence of it in Czech culture. And it’s a really cool thing to do when you’re here in the city. This night took us to another more eclectic looking bar. It’s just full of students and vibrant energy. You literally have to scale the walls to get to some of the tables. I’m not joking. Even I felt a little old to be here. Everybody knows that I’m a good girl officer. [Music] Good morning. Last night we uh forgot to fill you in because we were running about, but we went to this bar called Hemingway Bar. We both tried Absent, which was super fun. It’s my second time. Yeah. I tried it in university at the AB. The Absin Pub. Those who know know. And um you tried it in a cocktail as well last night, which was really cool. This whole bar was like an incredible cocktail bar. It really was like the art of cocktails. They are known for specifically absence, but I think all their cocktails looked incredible. Yeah, we were watching them come out and like seeing which one was which based on the menu. And I tried it the most the typical traditional way which was served with like ice water and you could let it drip in as much as you want to dilute it and bring out the herbal flavors and notes of the absence. I really enjoyed it. We’re both not the most anise loving people, which is really like the forward flavor of it, but overall it brought out a lot of like interesting herbal notes and spice notes and I really enjoyed it. It really gave sort of like a warm feeling. Yeah, maybe it’s a placebo, but it definitely felt like and I think different like wine drunk versus a beer drunk versus a cocktail drunk is different. And this definitely gave Are we Do you want before we go in? Oh, my bad. But I thought this was the restaurant back. There’s different types of drunks and this one definitely gave more of like a warm like chill vibe. It’d be weird to like sit at home and like watch a show and have a glass of absence I think. But that’s would be nice to do. Yeah, it was very relaxed vibe which was nice. If you’re ever in Prague, I would recommend trying it at this Hemingway bar just because they could do it the traditional way. They had fun cocktails and it was just such an overall lovely experience with the different mixologists and bartenders. They were incredible. Yeah, we have to do laundry today. The fun side of traveling longterm. And then we have a fun plan tonight. And on a morning after like this one, food, good food is also in order. We stopped for a delicious brunch. And even more excitingly, we also stopped to try a staple in the Prague street food scene, the chimney cake. Some believe this is totally a tourist trap thing, but they are everywhere here in Prague. So, we had to give it a go and see if the hype is real at all or if you should avoid at all cost. Okay, so we are here trying a chimney cake in Prague surrounded by all of the authentic Prague experiences, the duck boutique, the giant aoy captainy candy places, and a dozen souvenir shops and a weird cannabis shop in the corner. If you’ve ever been to Europe, you know if you see all of these things in a corner, you’re about to get the authentic local experience. Joky joke. These chimney cakes are a bit funny because they are kind of a tourist thing, but I it’d be crazy to go to Prague and not get a chimney cake, but I think the only people that eat them are tourists. So, one thing I did find out, most of the places you’re going to see and most people eating them are eating it with ice cream. And the ice cream only started in 2016. And when it started, the locals were like, “Nobody’s going to want that.” Like, “Ice cream, that’s way too much.” And now it’s basically the number one seller. Every chimney shop now sells it. The more authentic, quote unquote, is with chocolate or just plain. That’s how we’re getting it. I just feel like the ice cream, everyone, it’s dripping everywhere. Lots of them have toppings. Like, it’s just a bit too much. Another authentic experience. the group of Americans behind me. Okay, please pause. We’re going to move. So, let’s give it a go. It’s way lighter than I thought. The cake itself is not really sweet, just the chocolate and there’s a bit of sugar. Yeah, it’s delicious. The chocolate is good. It almost is like a Nutella chocolate, which is really good. It’s actually quite like it’s not as thick as I think you would think. I thought it was going to be crispier. It’s not super crispy, but has a little bit of a chew to it. Yeah, chewy is a good word. It sort of has like a chewy bready texture to it, whereas I thought it was going to be more fried up and crisped up kind of texture the way people were having them as like cones with their ice cream. So, it’s really good. I’d recommend if you kind of like sweet bread and chocolate, what’s not to like? I even think plain it would be really pleasant. You got to give it a try when you’re in Prague. I’m back. I don’t know. I’m in a silly goofy mood. Um, now maybe it’s like the sugar rush. It’s already happening. I feel the rush addicted to I’m halfway through. I’m strongly advising against the ice cream one would totally lose the cake. It’s really not like that potent of a flavor. It would get just a bit too soggy. I think it looks better than it actually would be. You throw the ice cream in there, all you’re going to get is ice cream and you’re going to lose the chimney cake. At that point, you should just eat ice cream. Don’t ruin it. I’m begging you. A really good tip we got from one of our tour guides here in Prague is when you’re looking at the price of beer somewhere, beer should be no more than like €2 or3. That’s like 50 to 75 Czech karuna. If it’s more than that, then you know it’s probably a tourist trap because they’re charging you more than what they would charge, but a little less than what it would be in other countries to still feel like you’re getting a great deal on the chicher here. So, watch out for that. We’re here in a hallway of bulletproof bar trying to get into a speak easy. They’re going to give us customized cocktails based on a brector test. So, I’m excited for this. I wish my hair was a little bit drier, but it’s going to dry in the meantime. It’s going for the wet look. It’s going for the slick back. Kim, Kayla look, how good are these braids? You did great. I did that, too. Another underground culture that’s had a resurgence in Prague is the speak easy scene. Also, girl, I said breto test based on a brector test. It is the roarshock test. I mean, we’re breto test. We need women up in here, but I meant to say roar shock test. This has not embarked with us. We had to look at these cards and think about how we feel, think about which one spoke to us, and just go with our intuition. This was the coolest experience, and we were very curious about it. You could look for little hints and like notes of things on the back just to see if you would fully like something before ordering it, but we went purely based on the test. It’s the cool thing about Prague’s nightlife is there is a venue for everyone’s and everyone’s type of taste. There’s the continent’s largest nightclub. There’s a pub from the 13th century. Lots of popular queer and gay venues. Truly something for everyone. And for us tonight, it’s this speak easy with the whole vibe here has got me feeling a little unsettled, but I’m kind of into it. I think you never know what you’re going to find on a night out in Prague. Later on, we stumbled upon I think them filming the Where’s Waldo movie. If we see this in theaters later on, I saw it here first. And three, two, one, action. That is up. And the night didn’t even end there. We went onto a haunted Prague nightwalk, which we’ll tell you a bit more about soon. There’s something about experiencing Prague at night. Like a hidden part of this city comes alive and it reveals itself a little bit differently to everyone. I feel like we’ve experienced really popular touristic things here that make sense cuz they’re really fun and also really unique things that I would have never expected to try. Or maybe no one day in a city like Prague is ever truly the same. [Applause] All right, we’re on our train to our next destination. We just left Prague this morning, so we just wanted to wrap up with some final thoughts last night. We went to a really cool speak easy. We were there with you and did a roar scarch test. Close enough to get our drinks and I was pleasantly surprised how much they fit what we would order and like our vibes of drinks even. Like they were like the flavor profiles that we would totally have ordered if we had known what they were. And those were just ones that we based on completely blind choosing choosing the picture. We both we picked all different ones obviously and we liked ours more than we liked the others which I thought was really interesting. So that was a really cool experience. It was definitely a little bit on the pricier side but you pay for the experience of it and it’s one of those things that’s cool to do cuz it’s not everywhere. We did a little ghost tour last night. We did it with the same company that we did the other tours and Jonathan made a great point. It was more like historical haunting or haunting history. Like more like kind of like spooky history, but it was definitely more history than like fables, legends, sort of the dark side of history of Prague. Historical things that happened that were sort of darksided. It really highlighted a lot of those. But that was a cool niche tour. As you can see, we have a bit of a full train. It’s a great ride so far and I love being on the train and seeing all the little towns. It’s like one of my favorite parts about traveling by train. We’ve gotten tons of message when we’re saying in Prague of people saying, “I’ve gone five, six times. It’s my favorite city. It’s the city I go back to.” Because it was just so fun to like walk around and explore. I highly highly recommend one not to stay right in Oldtown and also to make sure you like mainly do things outside of Oldtown. Oldtown is like quite touristy and that’s it’s beautiful. There’s a reason to go see it, but like I loved all the parts around. I love New Town. I love Lesser Town. I love the castle district. So, I would recommend staying in one of those areas or make sure that you’re spending most of your time eating the foods in those areas, walking around those areas, and like popping in to Oldtown. We noticed there was a lot of students there doing their work there studying abroad, which I think would be such an amazing place to do your study abroad just cuz it’s lots of history, lots of culture, which lots of these like big European cities have, but it feels like a young person’s town. There’s so many cool things to do, so many unique bars and places to go at night. Like the night life was just incredible. At the same time, it is slightly more affordable than some of the other like big meccas in Europe. So, it just would be a really cool place to be a student. I think we found overall the people really friendly as well. Tour guides were incredible. The people at restaurants were so lovely and so like wanting to help us experience what we were there to experience. If we went to a more like local cuisine, they really would explain the dish. Yeah. So, I would really recommend Prague. I hope I go back to it at one point. I hope so, too. I would love to go back. I definitely think it’s one of my favorite European cities I’ve ever been. Um, so yeah, overall it was an amazing experience and the next place we’re going to for like a very short amount of time, we’re like squeezing it in and we are in the last week of our trip in Europe. Yeah. So, which is a bit bittersweet, but right now I’m just trying to live in the moment. Just trying to soak up all the European summer that I still have even though it’s almost the end of September. Yeah. The weather is taking a drastic turn uh to getting colder and colder, which is also making me want to more excited for our next destination cuz it’s going to be warm. But yeah, I agree. After going to such a divisive city as Prague, we’ve heard from lots of people they either love it or they just really didn’t connect with it. I feel like we stayed in a really good area. And I had such a great time. We were only there for three, four days, but I feel like we saw so much and did so much and got such a good taste of it. We walked like 20,000 steps plus a day. So, yeah. And it didn’t even It definitely made our feet No, it did. My legs are hurting today. We’re We’re old. We’re getting sore. I cannot take these cities the way I did at We were like 21, 22. Yeah. I can’t take these cities the way Maybe we got to upgrade our footwear. No, I was wearing my best shoes. It’s my body. Can I upgrade my body? Yeah, you can get a knee replacement. Oh, I don’t think I’m there yet. Check back in 10 years. The truth about night life in Prague is that if you’re not enjoying it, you’re probably just not in the right spot. There is truly something for everyone. If you want to have the most raging party, if you want to chill and vibe, if you want to learn history, there’s a way to do that after dark in Prague. This city is affordable. It’s a really central location if you’re going to a bunch of different places in Europe or backpacking. And just like traveling, this city really feels like the adventure you make it out to be. Make sure to subscribe and follow along because next we’re going to a city for a very quick turnaround. So, it’s going to be like the Amazing Race up in here. [Music]

Prague is one of Europe’s most famous destinations — but what is the nightlife in Prague really like? In this vlog, we dive into the hidden side of the city after dark, from sipping authentic absinthe at the legendary Hemingway Bar, to exploring quirky student pubs, and even testing cocktails based on a Rorschach test inside a secret speakeasy.

We also take on a true Prague street food staple — the chimney cake (trdelník). Is it just a tourist trap, or worth trying when you visit? Plus, we join a haunted night walk through the city to uncover Prague’s darker history.

If you’ve ever wondered what to do in Prague at night, where to drink, or whether absinthe lives up to the hype, this video shows the full experience. Whether you’re backpacking through Europe, planning a weekend getaway, or looking for the best bars in Prague, this guide will help you see why so many travelers keep coming back to this city.

Don’t forget to subscribe for more travel vlogs — next up, we’re hopping to a brand-new destination with only a short stopover.

#prague #praguenightlife #absinthe #europetravel #travelvlog #backpackingeurope #hiddenprague #praguefood #czechrepublic #chimneycake #speakeasy

🎥 Watch Part 1 of our Prague adventure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DBO77uG3LQ
🎥 More Travel Vlogs & Tips: https://youtu.be/69C85jRho1s?si=8TwXbz6GHvtrhxyx

📍 Chapters
00:00 – Intro: Prague After Dark
00:31 – Absinthe in Prague (Why It’s Unique Here)
00:58 – Nightlife Energy at Student Bars
01:23 – Night out at Hemingway Bar: Absinthe the Traditional Way
03:21 – The Famous Chimney Cake (Tourist Trap or Must-Try?)
06:39 – Tip form a local: the price of beer price
07:09 – Hidden Speakeasy with a Rorschach Test
09:02 – Haunted Night Walk Through Prague
09:36 – Final Thoughts: Why Prague Nightlife is Worth It

🧭 Travel thoughts
• Ask locals questions—they often have the best stories.
• Don’t rush. There’s more to explore than you may have originally thought.
• Stories are the real souvenirs we take from travel.

💬 Let’s connect
What’s a place you would love to visit with your bestie? Drop your thoughts in the comments—I’d love to hear them.

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