Field Notes: May 2025

The Czech Countryside, Remembering Susana Trilling + new restaurants in Chile & El Salvador.

A regular round-up of culinary news and notes from around the Americas, and beyond. If you have any tips, drop me a line thenewworlder@gmail.com.

Photo: Nicholas Gill.

A Brief Foray in the Czech Countryside

“Food has no flag, man,” said Michal Hugo Hromas, as he cut a thin slice of lardo on a cutting board set of a grill box he made himself in his driveway about an hour west of Prague, not far from the borders of Křivoklátsko National Park.

Hromas worked for years restaurants around the Czech Republic, but eventually went off on his own and began a catering business called Nomadis, living life as he chooses, traveling widely and gathering stories and techniques wherever he goes.

Over the next couple of hours we would eat wild boar that he hunted and apple strudel he baked in a mobile wood fired oven, while drinking and conversing about food around the world, from Bolivia to the Levant.

I was with Max Jones, the Ireland based traditional food conservationist, transhumance guide and founder of Up There The Last (also on Substack at

Up There The Last

). We both gave presentations at a conference on food writing that was being held at the restaurant Alma in Prague, a zero waste restaurant with an attached wine bar and café that is helping create a conversation around Czech foodways. Jones and I had a free day after the conference and he said he wanted to get out of the city and find someone making food in his garage. He was half joking, but a few introductions later we were connected with Hromas, who we were told might be standoffish, but kindly invited us to stop by. Matěj Prokop, who helped organize Alma Talks, offered to take us there.

Hromas is one of those rare souls in the culinary world that makes incredible food, the kinds of meals you dream of, but doesn’t want a restaurant or the attention that comes with it. He’s his own man, making his own grills and cooking tools because “80 percent of what you can buy is bullshit.”

Wherever he is needed, he loads up his truck, filled with wood and covered canvases, and takes it. He sleeps in a hammock in the truck and only brings yeast (a sourdough starter given to him by Italian pizzamaker Simone Padoana), water and vegetables with him. The rest he finds wherever he goes. He’ll cook at embassies and under bridges. Sometimes he’s hired to cook at weddings where people are used to sitting at tables with a knives and forks and this gypsy with shit everywhere shows up and they don’t quite know what to think until they taste what he serves.

“Lots of people can cook four dishes, but not everyone can feed 100 people,” he told us. “They can buy 300 grams of meat at the supermarket, but can they break down a whole animal?”

Hromas wrote two books to share his knowledge, Vandrbuch I. + II, that took him three years to write but describe in detail his two decades of outdoor cooking. They are in Czech (I’ve been reading them via the Scan to Text and then translating the words), though his detailed travelogues, personal recipes and choice to have complete lack of photos make them two of the most unique cookbooks I’ve ever read.