Avia Cafe - Mediterranean Restaurant in Brno

Before moving into this new flat, the super sweet owners introduced us to the surrounding restaurants. Avia Cafe was one of them.  It is on a small alley, and you can hardly recognize it as a restaurant from outside.  The square building was built in 1929 as the first modern sacred building (it was the Jan Hus Congregational Church) in the Czech Republic. Yes, it looks like you are walking into a modern looking church. And, even when you walk in, you stop for a moment and wonder if it is really a restaurant. You see a wide floor a few steps down with cheap looking tables and chairs in three rows and a set of round and white tiled pillars reaching up to the tall ceiling.  It makes you feel like you just steped into a public bath place or something. :)

However, once I got seated and looked at the menu, I immediately had a good sense about the place. Unlike other restaurants in Brno that have hundreds of menu items (someone needs to tell them to stop doing that!), Avia had a one-page menu. Sophistication! I love it.

There was also a list of daily specials available on a small blackboard. For the appetizers, we decided to go for a salmon tartar on the daily menu and a grilled eggplant filled with goat cheese from the regular menu. I have to say the salmon tartar was okay. I could smell fish. They could have reduced the smell by mixing in some more lemon, dill, and capper. The eggplant was excellent! We also had a bowl of cream onion soup with basil, which was also great. For a main dish, we ordered seared tuna with mashed potato (well, in Czech it is called potato puree), which was also very good.

We ended our dinner with a cup of cuppuccino and a wonderfully sweet Tiramisu. Superb!

I have to list Avia as one of my favorite restaurants in Brno. And most of all, the price was very reasonable.