Welcome to Location Scout, where GQ asks our favorite actors and directors for insider travel recommendations in places where they shot their last project.
Robert Eggers, the director of The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman, is known for his obsessive attention to detail when crafting his historical horrors. It’s precisely that discerning mindset that made us want to hit him up for travel recommendations—in this case, for Prague.
The director spent nine months there for his latest movie, Nosferatu, an opulently freaky Dracula film starring Bill Skarsgård, Nicholas Hoult, and Lily Rose Depp, out on December 25. Though Nosferatu is set in the fictional German town of Wisborg and in rural Transylvania, it was largely filmed in Prague’s Barrandov Studios.
Eggers moved his family from London to the residential Vinohrady neighborhood, where they quickly got comfortable. He recalls being on the phone with Skarsgård, who had just seen his Dracula makeup and was getting nervous. “We were walking through Wenceslas Square and my son could tell that Bill was worried about something,” Eggers recalls. “And he said, ‘Tell Bill Prague is a magical city.’”
Here, Robert Eggers tips us off to his favorite spots in Prague, including restaurants, bars, and the bone church he describes as “a must-see for all goths.”
There’s tons of coffee shops and restaurants, but Kro is particularly good. They have a coffee shop that has coffee and pastries and stuff, and then a little restaurant that is hipsterified traditional Czech food. But that place was so delicious.
It sounds horrifying, but the standout dish is the pork knuckles. Their roast chicken is so good. There’s a lot of places where you could get roast chicken, including the farmers market. It cost nothing to have this amazing roast chicken. And I still constantly have a hankering for roast chicken because of my time in Prague.
There’s a lot of meat and a lot of beer in Prague. If you’re a vegetarian, you can definitely do Prague, but when you’re in the Czech Republic outside of Prague, it becomes a little more difficult to be a vegetarian. There were plenty of vegetarian and vegan crew members. Pilsner Urquell is all over the place, but the locals will say, “This place has good beer. That place has not so good beer. This place has excellent beer.” It’s always Pilsner Urqell, but it’s about how cold it is and how carbonated it is and how they pour it. So anyway, this is one of the prime Pilsner Urquell spots. And then they have a butcher counter where you can point to a steak or ask for a burger. But then you can also then go to an area with cooked food with a big tray and ask for how much beef neck and how many sausages, and they weigh it.
