ALMA PRAGUE
- Jul 28
- 12 min read
Updated: Jul 29
The House That Taught Me How to Read Places
How a former cinema site became a Prague cosmos of food, wine, craft and conversation — and helped shape the idea behind fajn.
I didn't leave ALMA thinking about lunch. (even though it was great)
Or the wine. (a revelation)
Or the architecture. (at least not primarily)
I left thinking about connections.
How one place can hold so many people, disciplines and ideas together without ever feeling fragmented. How architecture can extend beyond walls and become hospitality, graphic design, craftsmanship, bread, wine, fermentation, conversation and everyday ritual. And how every person involved quietly shapes the experience without needing to stand at its centre.
That afternoon in Prague became one of the reasons why FAJN. exists.
Not to collect beautiful places. But to understand how they come into being.
The places that stay with us are rarely defined by a single building, a celebrated chef or an accomplished interior. They are cultivated ecosystems in which architecture, hospitality, craft, food, objects, materials and people reinforce one another until it becomes difficult to say where one discipline ends and the next begins.
Every project like this opens another thread.
An architect leads to a blacksmith.
A graphic designer to a type foundry.
A loaf of bread to a bakery, a mill and a field of grain.
A bottle to a winemaker, a vineyard and a region.
Suddenly, a single address becomes an entire cultural network.
That is how FAJN. reads places: not as isolated destinations, but as living systems that continue far beyond their own walls.
For this story, I deliberately chose to see ALMA through the perspective of photographer Radek Ulehla. His photographs do not simply record the architecture. They reveal relationships between light, material, movement and atmosphere that are as much a part of the place as the experience of being there. Photography becomes another act of authorship — another way of reading the same house.
Few places embody this way of thinking as naturally as ALMA.
shop, restaurant, café – ALMA PRAGUE by NEUHÄUSL HUNAL, photos by Radek Úlehla
A name already waiting
ALMA occupies a layered complex in V Jirchářích, a narrow street in Prague’s New Town, behind the National Theatre and close to the river.
The site had already lived many lives before its present one. Over more than six centuries, its interconnected structures had contained Gothic dwellings, Baroque cellars, stables, a tannery, a hat-maker’s workshop, a printing house and, during the twentieth century, an arthouse cinema called Alma.
The present name was therefore not invented for a new hospitality concept. It was already waiting within the place.
The former cinema remained active until the 1960s. ALMA does not attempt to reconstruct its auditorium or turn cinema history into themed decoration. What it continues is something less visible: the building’s social premise. People once entered to watch a film and spend time together. Today, they may arrive for coffee, lunch, a bottle of wine, a talk or a late drink — and often remain longer than intended.
There is another fortunate meaning in the inherited name. Alma can be translated as nourishing, nurturing or caring. A century after the cinema’s founders selected it, the word has acquired a new relevance through a contemporary form of hospitality built around food, openness and exchange.
The building’s previous lives are not presented as a linear historical exhibition. They remain legible through differences in volume, structure and material: vaulted rooms, heavy masonry, concrete additions, basement chambers and the remnants of a First Republic printing house.
Rather than choosing one period as the building’s authentic identity, ALMA accepts that the place has always been composed of different chapters.
Its coherence does not come from making those chapters look the same.
It comes from allowing them to speak to one another.
old & new – ALMA PRAGUE by NEUHÄUSL HUNAL, photos by Radek Úlehla
From KRO to ALMA
ALMA did not begin as a detached prestige project.
It grew from the work of Vojtěch Václavík and Petr Němec, the team behind Prague’s KRO businesses. The first KRO opened in 2019 with a deceptively simple idea: techniques and discipline learned in ambitious kitchens could be applied to everyday food without importing the ceremony or stiffness of fine dining.
KRO describes its own approach as fine-dining skill with a casual atmosphere. Food is made from scratch, ingredients are used as completely as possible, fermentation is treated as a working tool rather than a fashionable addition, and long-term relationships with growers and producers shape what reaches the plate.
The word KRO itself comes from the Norwegian term for an inn, tavern or roadside place of refreshment. It is also pronounced much like “crew” — an apt coincidence for a hospitality culture that consistently emphasises collective work.
ALMA became the most ambitious extension of that thinking.
It was developed by the same founders, informed by the same working culture and designed by NEUHÄUSL HUNAL, the architectural studio that had already collaborated on the wider family of KRO bistros, cafés and bars. The accumulated experience of those smaller places was not discarded when the scale increased. It became the foundation for something more complex.
The connection between KRO and ALMA is not merely biographical or strategic. It remains operational.
Bread served at ALMA comes from KRO Bakery. Fermentation, whole-product cooking and a close supplier network form part of both systems. Products created under the ALMA name travel in the opposite direction: ALMA Aquavit and ALMA Mulberry Brandy, for example, appear on KRO menus. Pavel Sochor works across the group’s bar culture, developing ALMA’s more experimental drinks while guiding the more accessible bar programmes at KRO.
These are not symbolic collaborations arranged for a launch.
They are actual flows of people, ingredients, products and knowledge.
KRO and ALMA operate at different registers, but they belong to the same organism. KRO remains the more immediate, everyday expression: a place for lunch, coffee, pastries or a spontaneous meal. ALMA gives the same philosophy more space in which to expand — into wine, cultural programming, a dedicated fermentation laboratory and a more layered relationship between architecture and time.
The distinction matters.
ALMA is not a group of unrelated concepts gathered beneath a single brand. Nor is it simply a larger KRO. It is what happens when an existing hospitality culture is allowed to grow into an entire house.
also a restaurant – ALMA PRAGUE by NEUHÄUSL HUNAL, photos by Radek Úlehla
One house, many rhythms
Calling ALMA a restaurant is convenient but incomplete. Its ground floor alone contains a café, restaurant, open kitchen, wine shop, wine bar, courtyard garden and a dedicated maturation room. Below ground are a bar, wine-ageing spaces, tasting room, fermentation laboratory and a hall for talks, events and gatherings.
The floor plans make the relationships between these functions especially clear.
The garden sits between the restaurant and wine bar, less as leftover outdoor space than as a hinge. The café faces the street and receives the morning. The restaurant occupies the generous centre of the plan. Wine moves towards the rear and down into the cellar. Fermentation and maturation are held close enough to the public spaces to belong to the story, without turning production into theatre.
There are few long, neutral corridors. Movement happens through inhabited rooms. One space produces the next. Coffee leads towards lunch. The restaurant opens into the garden. The garden connects to the wine bar. The wine bar points towards the shop and cellar. Downstairs, the cellar becomes a place not only for storage but for tasting, experimentation, drinks and discussion.
This choreography changes with the day. Morning belongs to the pale café and its more casual rhythm. Lunch and dinner draw people towards the open kitchen. By evening, wine and cocktails extend the visit into darker rooms. The underground bar can shift again, taking on a nocturnal life of its own.
ALMA never demands that every visitor experience the entire sequence. One may come only for coffee, another for a bottle, another for dinner or an event. The house offers different depths of participation.
That may be one of its most generous qualities. It does not insist on a prescribed experience in order to prove the coherence of its concept. The connections are there whether or not every guest consciously follows them.
Gesamtkunstwerk – ALMA PRAGUE by NEUHÄUSL HUNAL, photos by Radek Úlehla
A day written into materials
The architectural task faced by David Neuhäusl, Matěj Hunal, Veronika Zelenáková and Jakub Zelenák was not to devise one recognisable visual gesture. It was to find a language capable of connecting radically different spaces without flattening their individuality.
The complex includes historic vaulted structures, contemporary concrete construction and the former printing house. NEUHÄUSL HUNAL chose to treat them differently. Old and new remain readable, while recurring proportions, materials, colours and lighting establish a broader family resemblance.
The architects describe the principle as in varietate concordia: unity in diversity.
The most legible connecting element is ceramic tiling laid vertically throughout the house. Its colour gradually darkens from the lightest tone in the café to the deepest shade in the basement bar. Furniture, joinery and upholstery follow a similar progression: their underlying language remains consistent, but their weight and character adjust to the function and atmosphere of each room.
The building’s daily rhythm is therefore written directly into its material palette.
Morning is lighter.
Evening becomes denser.
The distinction is subtle enough to feel atmospheric rather than diagrammatic. Transitions between historic and new sections are not concealed. Metal grating introduces a more abstract, technical expression at the points where different structures meet. Lighting also changes according to context: one family of fixtures belongs to the historic rooms, another to the contemporary additions, while transit spaces receive their own treatment.
Coherence here does not mean repetition.
It means correspondence.
The restaurant is organised around compact volumes of stainless steel: the open kitchen and bars appear as robust working objects rather than decorative counters. Their surfaces were developed with art blacksmith Peter Demek of DEMO Works, who scratched the steel with stone to create a bespoke, less clinical finish.
The gesture is almost contradictory.
An industrial material becomes tactile through manual labour.
Around it, natural timber and Heraklith wood-wool panels bring warmth and acoustic softness. Takt furniture adds another restrained layer. None of these elements asks to be viewed as a statement piece. Together, however, they create an environment of unusually precise material relationships.
Ceramic Art – ALMA PRAGUE by NEUHÄUSL HUNAL, photos by Radek Úlehla
Authorship in company
ALMA demonstrates that an authored place does not require a single dominant auteur.
Its identity is collective, but not anonymous.
Jan Horčík developed the graphic design, information and navigation system in close dialogue with the architects. Heavyweight typography moves through signs, menus and illuminated boxes, giving orientation a tone of voice rather than reducing it to functional signage.
The graphic elements have enough humour and colour to loosen the sober interior, yet they remain part of its architecture. They do not arrive afterwards as a layer of branding.
Peter Demek’s metalwork gives weight and texture to the bars, kitchen and transitions.
Pokojovky introduced planting that softens the meeting between the house and its garden.
Bulb supplied a lighting system drawing from Czech and international makers, including Brokis, Davide Groppi, Flos and Modular Lighting Instruments.
The contribution of each collaborator is distinct, but none is isolated from the others. The strength of the project lies in the conversations between them: typography against masonry, plants against steel, warm light against concrete, hand-finished surfaces against technical kitchen equipment.
The official project description is unusually explicit about the role of trust between client, architects, graphic designer, construction team and craftspeople. That acknowledgment is important. It shifts the story away from the myth of solitary architectural authorship and towards the conditions required for collaborative coherence.
Every contributor brings a specific competence.
The place works because those competencies were not allowed to become separate worlds.
The kitchen is not a closed room
The same principle extends into food and drink.
ALMA’s kitchen, led by Petr Židek, is built around respect for ingredients: their seasonality, origin, individual qualities and the people who produce them. Its suppliers are named rather than absorbed into a general language of locality. Dairy, vegetables, meat, fish, oils, eggs and vinegars arrive through a network of farms and specialist producers, while foraging expert Tomáš Reisinger gathers herbs and wild plants in fields, forests and meadows.
Bread and pastries connect the house directly back to KRO Bakery.
Food is then worked through a series of techniques that are also spatially embedded in the plan: fire from the konro grill and wood-burning oven, dry-ageing in a dedicated maturation box and experiments in the fermentation laboratory.
The laboratory is not a metaphor for creativity. It is a real part of the house.
So is the attempt to use ingredients more completely. Vegetables, meat and fish are approached through the same whole-product logic that shaped KRO: surplus can be pickled, dried, fermented or transformed into sauces, drinks and seasonings. The exact routes change with the menu, but the principle remains consistent — one process is allowed to inform another.
Wine holds equal status.
The list assembled by head sommelier Dragan Bogdanovic moves across Europe while reserving substantial space for Czech and Moravian growers. Producers working with minimal chemical intervention sit alongside different generations and stylistic positions. The aim is not to present natural wine as a uniform taste or fashionable category, but to build a selection around farming, material quality and individual character.
At the bar, drinks become another field of experimentation. Ferments, spirits, preserved ingredients and low- or non-alcoholic alternatives are treated with the same seriousness as cocktails. Pavel Sochor’s work across both ALMA and KRO makes the relationship between the two systems particularly visible: techniques may be developed with greater complexity at ALMA, then translated into a more immediate form elsewhere in the group.
Knowledge does not remain fixed to one address.
It travels.
Hospitality as public conversation
ALMA’s cultural dimension is clearest in AlmaTalks.
The series brings together chefs, farmers, producers, journalists and hospitality professionals for discussions about subjects such as soil and food supply chains, zero-waste practices, food criticism, journalism and the changing meaning of quality in baking.
These are not decorative evening talks added to make a restaurant appear cultural.
They extend questions already present in the daily work of the house.
Where does food begin?
How should a kitchen relate to waste?
What responsibility does hospitality have towards farming, labour and the wider culture around eating?
How is food interpreted and communicated?
The events move between the restaurant, courtyard wine bar and underground hall, putting the building’s less visible spaces to public use. The series gives hospitality an intellectual and civic dimension without turning ALMA into an institution in the formal sense.
Perhaps this is where the social premise of the former cinema returns most clearly.
Not through a programme of nostalgic film screenings, but through the idea of a room in which people gather, pay attention and leave with something to discuss.
A Prague place
ALMA is highly considered, but it does not feel detached from the city.
Its café faces everyday life. The courtyard offers a quieter interior world. The different outlets allow people to enter at varying levels of cost, time and intention. A morning coffee does not require commitment to dinner; buying a bottle does not require participation in the restaurant’s full experience.
Whether ALMA can become the “cultural heart” of an entire neighbourhood is not something architecture alone can decide. That depends on repeated use: who enters, who returns and whether the place remains porous enough to form habits beyond its initial audience.
Yet the project creates the spatial and operational conditions for this to happen.
It is also part of a broader moment in Prague in which buildings are being reconsidered as cultural environments rather than isolated architectural objects. ALMA does this through the intimate scale of food, drink and daily ritual. The Fairmont Golden Prague, the subject of a forthcoming fajn. story, operates at the opposite end of the spectrum: a large modernist landmark negotiating architecture, art, hospitality and its relationship to the city.
Their histories and scales are entirely different.
The underlying question is related:
How can an existing place acquire a new life without losing the tension, memory and specificity that made it worth continuing?
ALMA’s answer is not preservation alone.
It is use.
Why FAJN. begins here
Leaving ALMA, it becomes difficult to say where the project ends.
Does it end with the building?
With the restaurant?
With a loaf from KRO Bakery?
With a typeface, a hand-worked surface or a bottle carried home?
With the farmer, winemaker or forager whose work entered the kitchen?
Or with a conversation that continues after an AlmaTalk?
Probably none of these.
A place like this does not stop at its address.
It extends through relationships.
That is why ALMA became so important to the idea behind FAJN.
It showed me that a place could be read not only through what stands in front of us, but through all the people, materials, decisions and cultural contexts that converge there. And that every one of those elements could become the beginning of another story.
ALMA does not ask visitors to understand its entire system.
It allows them to feel that the parts belong together.
Perhaps that is the clearest measure of coherence: not that every decision is visible, but that none of them feels detached from the rest.
This is where FAJN. begins.
Not with the place as a conclusion.
But with the place as the beginning of a thread.
The ALMA Cosmos
Hosts and founders_Vojtěch Václavík and Petr Němec / KRO
Architecture_NEUHÄUSL HUNAL
Kitchen_Petr Židek and Michal Daněk
Wine_Dragan Bogdanović / ALMA Wines co-owner
Bars_Pavel Sochor and team
Graphic design and wayfinding_Jan Horčík / Heavyweight
Metalwork_Peter Demek / DEMO Works
Plants_Pokojovky
Bread and pastry_KRO Bakery
Lighting_Bulb
Photography_Radek Úlehla
Public programme_AlmaTalks
///
Further Threads
This story is only one reading of ALMA. Many of its threads deserve stories of their own.
NEUHÄUSL HUNAL — How a long architectural relationship with KRO evolved from compact bistros into an 810-square-metre cultural and gastronomic house.
KRO –– The hospitality culture from which ALMA grew: fine-dining knowledge translated into everyday rituals, fermentation, community and food made from scratch.
ALMA Wines –– A changing culture of Czech and Central European wine, shaped by growers, importers and drinkers moving beyond the clichés surrounding natural wine.
Jan Horčík and Heavyweight –– When typography becomes navigation, tone of voice and part of the spatial experience rather than an applied graphic identity.
Peter Demek / DEMO Works — Contemporary blacksmithing and the point at which industrial surfaces recover the trace of the hand.
Pavel Sochor –– How drinks, fermentation and bar knowledge move between ALMA’s experimental setting and KRO’s more immediate everyday venues.
Pokojovky — Planting not as decoration, but as a way of softening thresholds and giving interior spaces their own rhythm.
Alma Talks — Hospitality as a platform for discussing soil, waste, labour, food criticism, grain and the responsibilities surrounding what we eat.
Radek Ulehla –– Photography as another form of place reading — one that interprets atmosphere rather than simply documenting completed interiors.
Prague’s former cinemas –– What remains when spaces once built for collective viewing acquire new social and cultural lives.
Vojtěšská čtvrť –– A quieter pocket of Prague’s New Town read through craft history, courtyards, surviving houses and contemporary hospitality.
