The growing popularity of cocktails has also spread to restaurants. The year-old restaurant Agave has a great cocktail list, mostly based on tequila and mezcal, to pair with its cleverly updated Mexican cuisine. If you’ve never had tamales and habanero sauce with an old-fashioned made with 23-year-old Zacapa rum, you’re missing out.

“They just go together, beef and bourbon, don’t they?” asked Juraj Filo, the general manager of George Prime Steaks, an upscale steakhouse with a solid cocktail list that is mostly bourbon-based. He estimated that 50 percent of his restaurant’s guests ordered cocktails before dinner, and about 10 percent stuck with cocktails through their meals, instead of wine; many also had a chocolate martini or another cocktail instead of dessert. “It’s part of the North American steakhouse culture.”

That’s true, which is probably why it still feels rare in Central Europe. Despite the new arrivals, Prague now has just one bar on the World’s 50 Best Bars list — the excellent Hemingway Bar, currently ranked No. 24 — but that’s one more than Vienna, the next capital over. (Berlin, a city three times as large as Prague, also has one bar on the list.) That means that many of the best cocktail bars here are fairly serious about what they do: not quite as serious as something out of D.J. Dave’s “Mixologist” video, but close.

During my nights out in Prague, a friend was denied entry by the doorman at Tretter’s, apparently because he was wearing sandals, even though the temperature at the time was over 90 degrees. The presentation at many Prague bars can be fairly (self-) serious, as well, in both good and bad ways.

At Hemingway, the house barrel-aged rum old-fashioned is served in a flask that arrives inside a hollowed-out book of Hemingway’s short stories, while the Hemingway’s Paparazzi (Havana Club rum, Becherovka, apricot brandy, sugar, apricot and chocolate tea, fresh lime and fresh mint) is served inside a high-speed Canon camera lens. At the six-month-old L’Fleur, a deliberately singed antiquarian book by the Czech poet Rudolf Tesnohlidek serves as a tray for the Decadente, an Armagnac-based take on the Sazerac. The good side of such presentation is that it’s fun and intellectually stimulating. But if you just stopped in for a quick one, you might find it to be a bit much.

One exception: the new Cash Only, a sister bar to Hemingway, though in this case a much younger sister, one who has entirely different tastes. Where Hemingway is serious and cool, playing jazz and lounge tunes, Cash Only is footloose and fun, offering up 95-koruna hot dogs as bar snacks and playing contemporary emo and rock tracks that just might make you feel old. In some ways, it feels less like a cocktail bar and more like a long, narrow dance club.