The Julius

If you’re a ‘I can’t do a thing before I’ve had my coffee’ person, prepare to be humbled by what 19th-century Renaissance man Julius Meinl achieved after his caffeine fix. The owner of a spice shop in Vienna, he launched a million annoying coffee bros by inventing a new way of roasting beans (‘It doesn’t require coal, yah, so it retains its natural aroma, yah’). From then, he was unstoppable, becoming the biggest coffee-roaster in the then Austro-Hungarian empire and largest importer of coffee and tea throughout Central Europe. He opened a chain of cafés and delis, had a street named after him and in 2022 his family launched Julius Meinl Living and the company’s first aparthotel, The Julius in Prague.  

Terry Pratchett once said, ‘Given enough coffee I could rule the world,’ and through the Meinl family line’s ongoing business interests (including new stays in Budapest and Bucharest) and philanthropic outreach, they’ve certainly made a dent — likely with trembling hands, a thudding pulse and eye twitch, at this point. I, on the other hand, am staying at The Julius, mid-work trip, vibrating at the table in our suite’s lounge-dining area, having made liberal use of the kitchen unit’s coffee capsules and espresso machine, struggling to string a sentence together for a guide to Prague I’ve been commissioned to write (watch this space).  

Unfortunately, I’m in illustrious company, and it’s making me look mediocre, because fellow fans of Meinl coffee apparently included other Austrian luminaries: Schiele, Klimt, Freud… The company also has a longstanding relationship with Italian talent Matteo Thun — a big deal in the design world as co-founder of the Memphis group, known for loud colours and fun, cartoonish shapes. Thun designed Meinl’s fez-hatted logo, oversaw a bold rebrand in 2010 and styled tableware for the cafés (available to buy, FYI). And — upholding Meinl’s potent percolation of artistic influence — he designed this hotel, pulling looks from the relatively recent Czech aesthetic movements of Art Nouveau and Cubism.  

Rooms and suites bear the soft citrus, coral and sage of native artist Alphonse Mucha’s illustrations (whose dedicated museum is just a 10-minute walk away); while public spaces go bolder, after the style of painter František Kupka (whose work you can see on display at Museum Kampa on the left bank of the Vltava River), in aqua and more fiery orange, with polished steel and wood finishes, bedecked with oversized bouquets.  
 
Ambient light fixtures draw from the age-old tradition of Bohemian glassblowing, but with a modern mien. No patination or foxed edges, this is a clean-cut stay for the smart-age traveller, with digitised check-in/out and an app to streamline everything that happens in-between — a Thai-massage booking, payment for a spin cycle in the laundry room on the ground floor, replacing a forgotten toothbrush, requesting a bamboo memory-foam pillow… Styled for long-term stays (hello, ample wardrobe space), it’s somewhere I feel settled in already, with an emotional-support, heated bathroom floor I go to stand on when I need time to think. 

As the spirits of legendary Czech artists swirl around me like wisps of Art Nouveau calligraphy, I feel peer — or rather, superior — pressured into more closely examining the city’s creative offerings. The bridge between Prague’s illustrious past and bright future is called Štvanice, and it crosses the north-eastern wend of the Vltava, delivering you to the Holešovice Market complex. Previously a slaughterhouse, it’s now home to cutting-edge galleries and cool-kid hangouts, with just the right amount of grime, still. Set within an orbit of prestigious academies and foundations, it has a kinetic energy we bet Meinl wishes he could bottle. Jatka78 hosts avant-garde plays and alt circus acts. Mr Smith and I find ones to watch at Trafo and Chemistry galleries; we gawp at pink polar bears on plinths, giant astro-girls and other larger-than-life installations — peeking in doorways reveals someone whittling a sculpture or daubing a canvas. 

It’s Mr Smith’s first visit to Prague, and graffiti-splattered concrete, part-demolished buildings and stripped-back industrial bars aren’t the usual mediaeval-Baroque, velvet-gloved ‘hello’ most tourists get (he is later introduced to the Old Town Square). But, as with The Julius and its forward-thinking attitude, it’s thrilling to see a city that’s navigated a complicated past and refuses be restrained in a glass case operating on fast forward. 

This thrust is nowhere more apparent than in the culinary scene — at one time dominated by dumplings and carnivorous to the core — now there are tasting menus (some at eye-popping prices that hammer the nail into Prague’s ‘20p a beer’ rep); brunch culture, with added queueing; a scene-y street-food market; TikTok-raved bakeries, oh my… At The Eatery, a place where you can watch the chefs be very serious about the food in their stainless-steel pen, the waiter talks us through the dishes, what’s house-made and so on, rather than presenting what I’m given with a surly glance, as was the style when I first visited the city in 2005. 

We dive deeper into more of Prague’s non-traditional lures: a culture hub with an urban beach-volleyball court; sinuous Zaha Hadid build; a psychology-themed speakeasy where Rorshach blots determine your dicktail, ahem, cocktail; artist David Cerný’s monster-woman statue hugging an apartment in Prague 8. I realise that the whole city’s been chugging some kind of go-go juice. It’s all very dynamic, if a little draining, packed into just one weekend (I need my heated bathroom floor now, please).  
 
As we wearily wander through the 15th-century Powder Tower and back to The Julius, what could possibly pick us up? A full-on session in the well-kitted-out hotel gym? Hmm, no. The restaurant’s signature veal saltimbocca or a face-sized schnitzel? Later, yes, but for now, to the bar for a very good, very powerful espresso Martini, because I simply can’t do anything else until I’ve had Meinl coffee.