Hungry in Hungary

Ciao!! We just got back from a quick trip to Budapest, so I’ll cut Italy some slack for the next couple postings, and talk about Hungary a bit. Budapest was a beautiful city; huge, with lots to see and do.  We chose Budapest because Ryanair was offering flights there for 2 euros each way, so how can you really say no? I didn’t really know anything about Budapest prior to going, but there’s definitely more to it than thermal baths and gypsies. But I’ll talk more about the city in my next posting; I made a couple videos, so that may take me some time to edit and such. This one I will dedicate solely to the food of Budapest.

Apparently, Hungary is known for having good food. They use lots of paprika, and tend to have heavy food. Lots of potatoes, dumplings, goulash, etc. I thought that it would be similar to Prague, which it was in some ways, but to me, Prague seemed to be a lot more meat and cabbage, while Budapest was really into soup.

Anyways, our first meal in Budapest was actually Greek, because apparently on Sundays, nothing is open, and the restaurants that are open seem to be concentrated in certain areas, which we weren’t aware of. So we spent over an hour just trying to find a restaurant that wasn’t Indian or kebabs (my stomach was already a little weak from drinking Hungarian sink water the night before).  The Greek restaurant was actually great though, we got a menu, which was two courses, as well as fresh lemonade for about $5 each. The prices were one of the best parts of Hungary, without a doubt.

So after a long day, we decided we should be able to find traditional Hungarian food. Once again, finding the food was not so easy.. Hungarians seem to have a different schedule for eating. They eat breakfast, no lunch, and then one large meal around 4 or 5. So looking for a restaurant around 9:30 wasn’t so easy. For every restaurant still open, there were at least 5 bars, so I guess Hungarians maybe just drink so much that they don’t have to eat. We finally found a place that looked reasonable, so we went for it. It was a lovely meal of goulash, paprika chicken, and crepes with chocolate sauce. There was gypsy music during the meal, so it was all around quite nice.

HOWEVER. It didn’t occur to me that the soup was probably made with the same water that I’d drank the night before, so I spent the next day with food poisoning. Not fun when walking everywhere, not to mention being way too pregnant in the first place.

The food highlight of the whole trip was definitely the second day. After I felt ok enough to try to eat again, we found a little restaurant that looked really cute, and offered inexpensive, delicious looking food. We tried to order one of each menus that they had, without actually knowing what we were ordering, as it was written in Hungarian.  Our waiter misunderstood and brought us each the same meal, which turned out to be vegetable soup. I was hungry and stupid enough to eat it, not realizing the water situation would probably be the same. After the soup, he brought us each a plate of something which we couldn’t really identify. It looked like gnocchi, with a brown sauce. So basically, it looked like a plate of poop. I tried it, expecting something savory, but it turned out to be dessert. It took me a minute to even be sure that it was in fact sweet, not savory, and then 10 more minutes to get the taste out of my mouth. It was truly one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever eaten. Apparently, it is called “Makos guba” and is a famous Hungarian dessert, and is supposed to be a bread pudding with poppy seed paste. Everything about that sounds decent, but I assure you, what they served us was repulsive. The best way I can describe how it tasted would be to imagine gnocchi boiled in toilet water, then covered in a gritty soap sauce, and topped with powdered sugar. Awful. And we each had a full plate of the stuff. People around us were eating it like it was no problem.. Paolo is a huge advocate of eating everything on your plate, never wasting, and even he wouldn’t eat the stuff. I couldn’t even order anything else after that, it was too bad to think about food for a while. Turned out, the restaurant was named after this dessert; it was their specialty.

After that, we didn’t really go too adventurous with our meals. I will never order anything again without knowing what I’m getting.  Even in Italy, it can be risky.. you may end up with horse pizza. So the lesson I hope to teach for today is: Be adventurous when it comes to trying food, but don’t go so far as to just be stupid.

Ciao for now,

Kathleen