Prague ranks among Europe’s cheapest dining spots—unless you’re local

According to a new Europe-wide survey, Prague is the seventh-cheapest major city on the continent for visitors to dine and drink. Impressively, travel magazine Time Out put the Czech capital as Central Europe’s most cost-effective city to eat and drink out. 

In its ranking, Time Out incorporated statistics from travel booking platform Omio, which featured the average cost of a meal, a cappuccino, and local and imported beer.

However, is dining and drinking that cheap for locals and those earning a Czech salary? The answer, unfortunately, is no. Czech lunch prices have surged more than 30 percent over the past four years according to a study by global payments platform Edenred, with many diners skipping soups and drinks to compensate. 

Data from from payment-services application Dotykačka shows that prices for the most commonly eaten lunchtime meals in Czechia—including schnitzel (řízek), goulash, and pizza —have become expensive by tens of percent, with some even increasing in price by more than half in the last five years.

The Big Mac Index, made by global publisher The Economist, is also a good indicator of relative costs of eating out. According to a December version of the index, a Big Mac costs CZK 109 in Czechia and USD 5.69 (CZK 136) in the U.S. This means that the Czech crown is undervalued against the U.S. dollar.

In other words, Czechia’s local currency buys fewer goods or services internationally than it should based on purchasing power parity. This is bad news for those earning a Czech salary, and means that people coming from countries with a higher GDP will tend to find dining and drinking out cheaper in Czechia than at home.

This is not the first time Prague has performed well in global-dining rankings. In 2022, international takeout and delivery app Just Eat named Prague the best city in Europe for a takeout lunch. Just Eat placed the Czech capital second overall internationally. Earlier this year, a Prague-based café chain, The Miners, earned a spot in a newly released global ranking of the world’s top 100 coffee shops.

In the Time Out rankings, the Norwegian capital of Oslo, Vaduz (the capital of Lichtenstein), and Reykjavik in Iceland offered the most expensive dining options respectively.