10-Mar-2023
We've mostly self-catered here. But there have been visits to cafes...
We went twice to MTRM Roast, for example, drawn back by the friendly staff and the pleasantly artistic environment, and -- of course -- by the good coffee and delicious Hungarian-Jewish pastries:
On the left, apple strudel; on the right, a walnut rugelach, dense and nutty and awesome
Babka, more a bread than a cake, and chocolate-infused...
But then this morning we found Ohana, and the scrumptious sticky raspberry pastries you see at the top...
Budapest is well endowed with markets, and the Great Market Hall is an exceptionally beautiful building:
It's interesting to tour the produce stalls on the ground floor. The stalls upstairs seem overly expensive, however. Locals definitely shop downstairs; I'm not sure they eat up here...
What we were on the lookout for at the market was langos, a traditional Hungarian fried-bread dish. We eventually found it on offer at our local market for a fraction of the price:
Ours was topped with garlic, sour cream, and smoked cheese, and was crispy and delicious. You need to bring a friend, though. You wouldn't want to tackle one of these on your own...
On the subject of sour cream, it's really everywhere here... Maybe it was everywhere in Bulgaria and Romania, and I just didn't notice, but truly Hungary is Sour Cream Central:
The sour cream I bought to top off our canned babgulyas (goulash with beans, beef, and bacon). I guess it's a travesty to come to Hungary, and eat goulash out of a can, but it was very tasty. Would buy again
It's abundantly clear, when you're shopping, that Hungarian is a very distinctive language (it's related to Finnish, but is not one of the Indo-European languages). In Turkey, I know some words; in Bulgaria, it's useful that I can read the Cyrillic characters, and some of the words are close to Russian; in Romania, you benefit (a little) from knowing French. But in Hungary, you're On Your Own, because nothing -- nothing -- is remotely familiar.
So you turn to Google Translate...
A quick tour of the dairy counters in our local supermarket made it clear, for example, that we're now out of the area that primarily does soft, white cheese, and into the area that does hard cheese. But when you ask Google for elucidation, you get things like this:
And below, just for the record, are the three cheeses we've tried here (not expensive -- the HUF 660 one, for example, is MYR 8.25 or GBP 1.50 -- and they were all very tasty):
To go with the cheese, of course, you need wine, and there's a nice rundown on Hungarian grapes and regions here.
Just for the record, so that we can extend our knowledge when we come back: