We love this city in all weathers, but never more so than under a midwinter blanket of snow, when lingering in its grand cafés and warming up in its palatial thermal baths is at its most pleasurable. No frigid winter’s afternoon is better spent than soaking in the stunning Secession Art Nouveau Hotel Gellert’s ‘effervescent swimming pool’ with its vaulted glass ceiling.
I come here frequently on business from our home in Warsaw, as the newly liberated countries of Central and Eastern Europe are simultaneously conducting their own experiments with western style capitalism, with advertising at the vanguard. Business is booming throughout the region as a who’s who of famous brands from around the world are falling over each other to win the hearts and minds of over 300 million new consumers and provide them with freedom of choice for the first time in decades. For a brief moment I even felt that for the first time in my career in advertising I might actually be doing some good! It didn’t last, as commercials were rapidly regarded as just a new more colourful form of propaganda, to be taken with a very large pinch of salt.
Poland, where we are based is second in size only to Russia and a whole lot more business friendly, (kidnappings and extortion tend to put a bit of a dampener on a company’s morale, talent retention and recruitment efforts), so many of these new invaders have chosen Warsaw for their regional centre of operations which means frequent trips to other parts of this fascinating region, with whenever possible, Sabrina and our daughter in tow. Ironically I haven’t made it to Russia on business, but Ljubljana in Slovenia, Bucharest in Romania, Prague in the Czech Republic and Bratislava in Slovakia, have all welcomed me at one time or another in the last couple of years. Friends are always surprised when I tell them that Budapest not Prague is by far our preferred place to visit, as despite the latter city’s stunning beauty it always feels more like a Renaissance and Art Nouveau theme park to us than a real place.
Budapest’s Danube setting is undeniably impressive but beyond its justly famed thermal baths and fin de siècle cafés, the city’s charms are much less obvious than Prague’s and warrant some effort to uncover. While not exactly unfriendly to visitors, few smiles are on offer and little English is spoken outside of the major hotels. Once mastered it’s easy enough to get by when shopping, which as in Warsaw is resolutely ‘at the counter’, as customers patiently form three lines, the first to request items and receive a ticket, the second to make their payment and the third to pick up the items with the receipt. Anything more complex however, can quickly become a real challenge. Sabrina’s heart sank one morning when after being reassured by the concierge at our hotel that the doctor she was booked to visit with our poorly daughter spoke English fluently, had to communicate with him mainly in sign language.
In the spirit of ‘lest we forget’ all the vilified monuments to Hungary’s recent past have been helpfully gathered together in Memento Park where the city’s Communist era statuary now reside en masse. Another holdover is the simultaneously charming (our four year old daughter loved it) and to us creepily disturbing narrow-gauge ‘Children’s Railway’ which runs through the hills and forests on the Buda side of the river and is staffed by local kids aged 9-14 years old. Formerly known as the ‘Pioneers Railway’ as it was manned by the crème de la crème of the youth wing of the Communist party, today it is run by girls in ‘pilotkas’ (Soviet Army style caps) who unsmilingly collect the tickets and boys in red caps and blue uniforms who crisply salute departing locomotives. Happily, the engine drivers and stationmasters are adults, so the experience is perfectly safe, but Sabrina and I found it unsettling, to say the least.
We love food shopping in the Neo-Gothic immensity of the Great Market Hall (the unpronounceable, like every other word in the fiendishly difficult Magyar language, ‘Nagycsarnok’), especially for the colourful bundles of paprika, which they string up in the same way as they do chilis in New Mexico. Continuing the paprika theme, no weekend visit would be complete without a long indulgent lunch at our favourite restaurant Gundel, which will more than likely extend into the late afternoon as we avail ourselves of its cakes and pastries (as Gundel does double duty as one of the city’s finest late Imperial era cafés).
This justly famed establishment blends traditional French cuisine (Karoly Gundel, the restaurant’s founder learned his craft at the feet of Ritz and Escoffier in Paris, before opening his eponymous establishment in 1910) and paprika is a key ingredient in his signature soup dish ‘Palóc’, his version of Goulash. The restaurant also makes a particularly fine Veal with Paprika and Mushrooms, which we often order.
Veal with Paprika and Mushrooms: Serves Three
You can dial the spice levels up or down when you make this dish, depending on your taste and your tolerance of its subsequent effects!
3 or 6 pieces of veal cutlets depending on the size (boneless chicken pieces are a good substitute if you are uncomfortable with buying veal)
4 oz button mushrooms, sliced
1 medium onion, halved and sliced
2 tbsp ground sweet paprika
1/4 cup reduced fat sour cream
Chicken stock to thin the sauce to your liking
Heat a large fry pan with 2 tablespoons of oil. Quickly brown the veal on both sides, remove and set aside. In the same pan, add a little more oil, add the onions and mushrooms, stir until both the onions and mushrooms are soft. Add the paprika, stirring all the time and not letting it burn, add the sour cream and some chicken stock. Season with salt and pepper, bring to the boil, reduce the heat and return the veal and any juice on the bottom of the dish, just to warm the veal.
It’s an evergreen debate whether it’s better to stay on the hilly, forested Buda side of the Danube with its Baroque Hapsburg palace and slightly patrician air, or its much livelier left bank neighbour, flat as a prairie Pest (our usual choice). In fact not so very long ago Pest and Buda were twin cities and it was only with the completion of the Chain Bridge connecting the two in 1849 and the formation of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy, that a capital city to rival Vienna was finally created in 1873.
We confuse our own debate on this topic further on this latest winter weekend visit by staying on Margaret Island. It may not be Budapest’s equivalent of the Île Saint-Louis on the Seine in Paris, but it does have a small zoo for our daughter and the Palatinus Strand, a Bauhaus-style thermal bathing complex. Unfortunately it’s way too cold to properly enjoy either of these, so we spend our time crossing the Margaret bridge to our old haunts on the left and right bank of the river.
Lesson learned!
Back in the year 2000, my husband and I honeymooned at the Hotel Gellert in Budapest, and took the ancient old elevators down to the baths in our hotel-issue robes. In January of 2019, while living in Paris, we returned to Budapest and the Hotel Gellert for our 19th anniversary. Our teenaged son went with us. The ancient elevator was no longer in operation, but we were able to get the same room for our return that we got for our honeymoon nearly two decades before. It had a giant anteroom with a communist-era desk, two bathrooms, two balconies, and the same tapestry that had hung on the wall on our original visit. We visited the baths again. I love that city so much. Thank you for your photos and your story! They take me back:)
This is a wonderful snapshot in time--makes me want to visit Budapest, but I wonder what it would be like now, given the reactionary government of Hungary. But I am eager to try making the recipe you included, perhaps with chicken rather than veal. Sounds really delicious!