ABSTRACT
Let me mention two explanatory notes at the very beginning. The presentation of Czech cuisine at world exhibitions was inextricably linked to Slovak gastronomy, which was particularly obvious in Montreal, a city with a rather big Slovak minority. Although Slovak meals were offered in specialised centres, they were part of a whole set of presentations of Czechoslovakia as a single country. Both types of gastronomy cannot be therefore seen as separate at world exhibitions. From this point of view, Expo 58 in Brussels played a crucial, groundbreaking role, while the Montreal Expo also contributed with some elements of its own. Whereas the Brussels Expo was an international première of the re-born Czech (and Slovak) haute cuisine, the world exhibition in Montreal became an impulse for the shaping of a sophisticated new-age version of top Czechoslovak gastronomy. The 1970 Osaka World Exhibition, in contrast, resonated to a very limited extent, which was associated both with the considerable distance between Japan and Czechoslovakia and the political development of the Central European country.
