When we first started forming our list of cities we wanted to visit this year, I added Budapest mostly for the food. I grew up eating at a family-run Hungarian restaurant in San Diego that my parents followed from location to location until I was about 20. (We even drove there just for dinner when it moved to Hemet.) The food is comforting to me. It reminds me of both of my parents in different ways and of my sister Kristina narrating silent movies to go along with the traditional music that played while we'd wait for our food. Budapest, for me, was all about getting Hungarian food at the source.
No surprise, then, that I opted to spend our first morning going to cooking school while Joe slept off the 3am Ducks playoffs game at our hotel. My outing meant taking this tram along the Danube: not a bad way to start the day.
When I arrived for my class I was surprised to find that I was the only student. It was a weekday, but still. My instructor, Kinga, and I are about the same age so it felt like hanging out with a friend for the day. We started with an informational tour of Central Market Hall, a three-story indoor market space with everything from fresh seafood to handmade table clothes. Kinga needed to establish how much I already knew about Hungarian food and cooking in general, and I just wanted to see and sample everything in sight. (The ground floor includes fresh fruit, veg, meat, spice, and nut stalls; the basement is all pickled things and seafood; the first floor is prepared foods and crafts.)
Note: I booked through Viator, but you can also contact ChefParade directly.
Left: the staples of Hungarian cooking - peppers as far as the eye can see and some tomatoes and cabbage on the side. Right: a carrot that looks suspicious.
Anyone who reads this blog knows I'm a sucker for fruit and veg displays and local markets in general. (So much color! So much personality! So photogenic! Food, delicious food! And it's healthy, too!) Since it was too early to eat much of anything, Joe and I came back the next day for some snacks.
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| Lángos (Hungarian fried dough) with coleslaw and cheese |
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| Stuffed cabbage, paprika & tomato sauerkraut, potatoes & sausage |
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| Making dumplings and depositing them directly into boiling water to cook. (The German variety, spaetzle, is larger.) |
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| Our feast. Notice the requisite container of sour cream at the ready. |
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| Chicken Paprikash |
Just like Dublin in fall reminded me of the Irish flag with its orange and green, Hungarian cooking seems to me to be the basis of the Hungarian flag: Red paprika, white dumplings, and green peppers, cabbage, or garnish to finish it off.
We spent the rest afternoon filling an unexpected need in our wardrobe: bathing suits. More on that in a bit. In the evening we took a (much longer than expected) walk to see the city's main site, Parliament, from across the river at night.
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| My pictures were awful so I stole a good one. |
Saturday was another sunny, hot day. After months and months of London cold, Joe and I are both as pale as we've been since birth. We've been covered from chin down since October, so the opportunity to wear sandals and shorts was a welcome one to say the least. After our market lunch we crossed the chain bridge toward Buda Castle and headed for the highest lookout point we could see - Mátyás Church.
Near the church, on the Buda side of the river, several lookouts have popped up along the old city wall. We were lucky enough to have a perfectly blue day to relax with a beer and an ice cream.
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| Matyas, or Matthias, Church on the right. Chain bridge visible on the left |
From this vantage point we could look across to the Pest side of the city. Our hotel was a few blocks behind the Parliament building on that side and we would highly recommend it.
Parliament in the background
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| selfie with Parliament |
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| selfie with Matyas church |
One of the must-do attractions in Budapest is a visit to the thermal baths. There are several on offer but the biggest and most popular are Gillert (on the Buda side at the bottom of Gillert hill) and Szechenyi (on the Pest side). I caught a glimpse of the thermal baths via National Geographic on Instagram about a week before our trip, but we forgot bathing suits. Please excuse my neon orange bikini; I swear it looked coral in H&M.
We tried to get into Hungarikum Bisztro on our first and second nights but finally managed a table with a reservation for 10 pm on Saturday, our last night in Budapest. This restaurant looks like a hole in the wall and doesn't seem from the outside like it should be so difficult to get in or would even be worth the effort, but we are so glad we didn't give up! So delicious!
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| Langos with garlic sour cream and cheese |
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| Roasted duck on braised red cabbage and potatoes. Cucumber salad with sour cream. Beef gulash stew with dumplings. |
The cooking class sounds so fun.
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