If there was one part of Prague that did not win me over, it was the food.

And believe me, I really wanted it to.

Given my Slovak heritage, you would think there might have been some deep ancestral connection waiting to happen. Maybe I would sit down in front of a traditional Czech meal, take one bite, and suddenly feel generations of Eastern European relatives nodding approvingly somewhere in the distance.

That did not happen.

Instead, I quickly discovered that almost everything seemed to involve some combination of meat and potatoes.

Meat.

Potatoes.

More meat.

More potatoes.

And occasionally some bread thrown in just in case the potatoes weren’t filling enough.

There were two problems with this.

First, I don’t eat meat.

Second, even when I managed to find something I could eat, nearly every meal felt incredibly heavy. Czech food is hearty, which probably makes perfect sense during a freezing Central European winter. But after several days of walking around Prague feeling like I had consumed my body weight in potatoes, I started desperately searching menus for something—anything—that looked remotely fresh.

A salad.

A vegetable.

A lonely piece of broccoli.

At one point I became convinced that the color green had simply been banned from Czech restaurants.

I would open a menu with hope, scan the page, and once again find potatoes, dumplings, cheese, bread, meat, gravy, and several other things designed to make you immediately want to take a nap.

Thankfully, Prague requires a lot of walking, because I’m pretty sure those miles were the only thing keeping us from having to be rolled back to our Airbnb every evening.

And, of course, during this particular period of my life, meals were usually accompanied by a glass of wine—or more—which certainly wasn’t helping that already overstuffed feeling.

By the end of the trip, I wasn’t dreaming about another traditional Czech meal.

I was dreaming about vegetables.

Actual vegetables.

When we left Prague, I told Sarah that when we got home, I wanted an entire plate piled with nothing but vegetables. No potatoes hiding underneath them. No dumplings on the side. No cream sauce poured over everything.

Just vegetables.

I felt like my body was preparing to send out an official nutritional distress signal.

There was, however, one Czech treat that completely won me over: trdelník.

That, I could get behind.

Warm, sweet dough wrapped around a cylinder, baked until golden, and coated in cinnamon and sugar—it was exactly the kind of food I was willing to make room for, regardless of how many potatoes I had already encountered that day.

Because apparently my complaints about heavy Czech food disappeared immediately when dessert entered the conversation.

Funny how that works.

Trdelník became the exception to my Prague food struggle. It was warm, sweet, delicious, and exactly the kind of thing that makes wandering cold cobblestone streets a little more enjoyable.

So, was Prague a culinary destination for me?

Absolutely not.

Sarah had a much easier time navigating the traditional food than I did, while I spent much of the trip trying to figure out how an entire country seemed capable of functioning with so few visible vegetables.

But that is part of traveling too.

Not every destination is going to match your taste buds. Sometimes you discover a cuisine you want to recreate the second you get home.

And sometimes you come home wanting to hug a salad.

Prague was definitely the latter.

But give me a warm trdelník?

I’ll happily make an exception.