A visit to a traditional Czech zabijačka
Good beer and honest cooking
We serve beer that's fresh, right to the last sip, and real home cooking. Lokál is a place where good beer and honest food matter.
We can safely say that the tradition of slaughter is as old as mankind itself. Slaughtering an animal and processing it thoroughly has been a necessity since prehistoric times. Back then, of course, it was a wild animal and the slaughter was preceded by hunting. However, there is something that links us with prehistoric people (apart from the obvious bloodlust): namely, the desire to feast together.
Killing has always taken place in the winter months (legend has it that Josef Jungmann tried to rename the last month of the year as "piggery"). Not only did people naturally have a greater appetite for meat and fatty foods on frosty days, but the cold kept the meat from spoiling during slaughter and butchering and made the products easier to store.
For us, this close connection to the cycle of the year has dimmed a bit, but the desire to indulge in a fresh sausage has remained for most of us. And so does the social dimension of this tradition. At the slaughter, the extended family (if not the whole village) gathers, and everyone puts their hand to work as best they can. In our case, we cook and bring it to the table, and you feast to your heart's content.
While in the villages it is common for the butcher to do the butchering in front of the diners, you won't see this ritual in Lokál. For hygiene reasons, everything takes place in the slaughterhouse. But we will show you how our butchers make their delicacies, right in front of your eyes.
Pigs in numbers
It probably won't surprise you to learn that you can cook a lot of food from a pig like this. Butchers and chefs can process 50 kg of meat, 70 fresh sausages, 40 blood sausages, 10 headcheeses and 50 litres of soup from a pig with a slaughter weight of around 110-130 kilograms.
At the slaughter feasts held in some Lokál locations, the guests only consume what our chefs and the butchers in the Amaso have prepared, while elsewhere the butcher comes to the "zabijačka" and demonstrates a bit of the tradition. Don't be scared of the pork head on the table, it only serves as a decoration.
A feast like this should be washed down with something proper and traditional! While the food calls for a pint, or maybe two (or more), don't ignore the brandy after the feast. How about trying our hruškovice, a pear liquor? We have fine-tuned the recipe in cooperation with the Rudolf Jelinek distillery.
The base of our hruškovice are pears grown in Rudolf Jelinek's Chilean orchards. From there, it travels to Europe by ship and is then stored in barrels in the Czech Republic, where it rests for exactly 146 days. It's a drink with to cleanse your tastebuds. And on an occasion like this, that's needed!
The text was published in the Štamgast newspaper, which you can get for free in Lokál restaurants. You can browse it online here. Have fun reading!
