Revolutions are supposed to begin with the whiff of cordite, not the subtle aroma of wild asparagus risotto. But, in the culinary badlands of Eastern Europe, an extraordinary insurgency is taking place — it is not blood that is flowing, it is the gastric juices.

High up on the barricades is Andrea Accordi, a 31-year-old chef from Verona, who has just earned a Prague restaurant the first Michelin star in the former Soviet bloc. This is the capital of the dumpling and the gritty meatball, where most dishes, duly battered and buttered, could sink a battleship. The country has been redeemed only by its powerful beer, so nutritious that it is often drunk in preference to breakfast.

“The expectations of the Czechs are now much higher, they demand much more from their food,” says Mr Accordi, executive chef at Allegro, in the Four Seasons hotel. “They travel, they experiment with tastes and when they return they want to do more than just feed themselves.”

Half of his customers are Czech. The rest are part of the travelling gourmet circus. Pinned to the noticeboard of Mr Accordi’s tight bustling kitchen there are snapshots of the heavyweight customers set to dine that night: various chief executives, Forbes listers and Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor, now on the Gazprom payroll.

In the background Mr Accordi’s Czech sous-chef, David Anger, a graduate of Raymond Blanc’s Michelin- starred Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons in Oxford, is barking out orders in Czech, Italian and English.

Allegro is not just a flash in the pan. Gordon Ramsay has recently set up the Mace Prague. The reviews are not in yet, but Pavel Maurer, Prague’s premier restaurant critic, approves.

We meet Mr Maurer in the Café Slavia, where writers and philosophers have argued since the Habsburg days. Even Slavia’s cooking — yes, dumplings — has improved dramatically. “The Czech Republic was a culinary disaster zone after the collapse of communism, then five years ago things began to pick up.”

The gastronomic revolution has not just gripped the Czechs. From Budapest a 24-hour cooking channel called TV Paprika has been broadcasting in several regional languages. Local celebrity cooks, would-be Jamie Olivers, are cropping up everywhere.

“There is suddenly a big demand for authentic locally sourced, imaginatively cooked food,” says Kaja Burakiewicz, who after setting up a Warsaw restaurant now runs a high-end catering business. “People have become curious about food again.”

Mr Accordi looks at me closely and sees a man in need of sustenance, and proposes a degustation that takes four hours of careful, concentrated eating. The abridged menu: lobster carpaccio, gnocchi with black truffle, monkfish with wild asparagus risotto, suckling pig on mashed potato with horseradish, cheeseboard including eight different goats’ cheeses, thin white chocolate filled with vanilla mousse and wild strawberries. It was tough but sometimes correspondents have to grit their teeth and get on with the job.

It was the closing of a gastronomic circle of 30 years of East European reporting that began with stomachrotting pork gristle in Brezhnev’s Moscow, the Polish food queues of the 1980s and the eternal struggle in East Germany to persuade a surly waiter to offer a table in an otherwise empty restaurant. Now, in Prague, waiters offer a footstool to place a handbag.

At €160, with wine, Mr Accordi’s degustation is not exactly food for the masses. But it is part of the nation’s food education. The chef, who won his first Michelin star in Villa La Vedetta, the Florentine restaurant, has persuaded a Tuscan farmer to show his supplier in North Bohemia how to make real ricotta.

The key to this success has been kitchen discipline. “Sometimes you have to scream a bit,” he admits. But the Gordon Ramsay “F-word” culture has yet to arrive. Prague, after all, was the home of the well-mannered bloodless Velvet Revolution.

Traditional Czech
Menu

Antipasti
Smazeny syr. Fried cheese with potatoes - washed, or rather flushed, down with strong black beer.
This can also serve as breakfast

Primi Piatti
Tennis-ball-sized dumplings, soggy, in butter.
Together with klobasy, spicy, fatty sausage

Secondo Piatti
Dech kopace Ondreje.
Translates as Digger Ondreje's breath – pork stuffed with cheese slices so pungent that you could trigger an emergency evacuation (of restaurant, or somewhere more personal).
More dumplings

Dessert
Kompot.
Canned fruit smelling vaguely of paraffin.
Hold the dumplings

Key survival phrase: Jsem vegetarian ("I am a vegetarian")

Four seasons
Sample menu

Antipasti
Yellow fin tuna caramelised with ginger on panzanella tartar with sesame seeds, red onion and orange, sour tomato sorbet

Primi Piatti
Handmade potato gnocchi with black truffle smoked black pork pancetta light taleggio cheese fondue and garlic cream sauce

Secondo Piatti
Bohemian suckling pig with horseradish mashed potato, sweet and sour pepper and spicy shallot, warm head terrine with crispy vegetables liquorice jus

Dessert
Giaundia sablé with mango mousse, mint and lemon sorbet liquorice powder

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