Why You Should Go To Budapest For The Food

Once upon a time, the Hungarians stumbled upon a type of chili pepper that could be dried out and ground, with variations from sweet to fiery.  Any culture that does that has something going for it.  They of course weren’t alone, since much of the world had discovered chilies by then, and they were also a bit late to the party, not really adopting it widely until the late 19^th century, but we’ll overlook that.  They also adopted not just the hot stuff but also found sweet chilies, but indeed let’s give them credit, because perhaps more than anyone else in Europe, they embraced the stuff.  For us travelers, that means that food is a perhaps unexpected pleasure in Hungary.

Paprika comes from the word meaning “little pepper”.  How cute.  Once the Hungarians got the taste, it took over, so much that much of their food now is like the 80s band Simply Red.  Hungarian food often gets the same comment as Korean food, that it’s unicolor, all one particular shade of red, and all vaguely tasting the same.  As with Korean food, if you stay long enough you’ll discover all types of other dishes, but even if you don’t you won’t get tired of the red sauce anytime soon.

I grew up in New York with my mom occasionally making goulash.  Not that we were Hungarian, but there were plenty of eastern Europeans in our neighborhood.  Goulash to me then meant a generic stew, a hodgepodge of things thrown together, but real goulash has its certainties.  Purists will tell you that goulash is a soup, not a stew.  Avoid these people.  Goulash (Gulyás) is the original peasant food.  Meat pieces, onion, potato, perhaps some veggies but that’s not necessary, lots of paprika, and a long stewing time.  Most goulash is made with beef, but sometimes it’s mutton.

If you travel around Eastern Europe, even into places like Austria and Croatia, you’ll see many dishes labeled “goulash”, some variation of chunks of meat in a gravy, served over some starch.  They may also just look like a meat soup.  The word gulyás originally refers to a herdsman, who would make the dish in a kettle over a fire in the open fields, throwing things in and letting it simmer.

Soups or stews are the soul of Eastern Euro food, and Hungary does them great.  Look for Pörkölt, another type of meat stew (more of a thicker stew than a soup), Halászlé, a fish soup, and either főzelék or lecsó, which is often vegetarian, with onions, potatoes, and peppers, though occasionally lard is thrown in.  They all contain paprika, and you just need to accept this theme in Hungary.

Catfish paprikash, and a bowl of goulash

Paprika and sour cream make up a large percentage of what you may eat there.  Take lángos, a flat fried bread, topped with things like mashed potatoes or various meats, and then sour cream.  Take rakott krumpli, a baked potato dish, like a gratin, sometimes jacked with meat bits, layered with sour cream.  Take paprikash (paprikás), a creamy sauce based on thinned sour cream jacked with paprika and usually covering a lighter protein, usually chicken but sometimes fish, then itself covered with more sour cream.  We can thank Billy Crystal in “When Harry met Sally” for making the dish popular again a few decades ago.

Brassói aprópecsenye is a dish belonging to the “it looks just like goulash” food category.  It’s from another city, Brassó, now in Romania, and apparently was originally based on margoram, but the Hungarians eventually jacked it with paprika anyway.  It’s cubes of pork, cooked with paprika, onion and garlic and served with cubes of potato, just like many other things.

Another category of Hungarian food is “stuffed things”, and they are usually jacked with you-know-what spice.  Töltött Káposzta is stuffed cabbage rolls, the type that every Eastern Euro country has.  Here they are filled with pork and often topped with paprika and/or sour cream.  Töltött Paprika are peppers stuffed with rice, veggies, and meat, jacked of course with paprika.  Hortobágyi palacsinta are pancakes with meat stuffing in a paprika sauce.

Other food blogs will give you long lists of individual dishes to seek out in Budapest.  I won’t try to imitate them; I just want you to understand that stews consisting of cubes of meat cooked with onion and garlic and paprika, and served with starch like potatoes or dumplings or pasta-like items, are a big part of your choices there, and you will do seriously fine with them.

Market food.  Notice the bowl of paprika in front, ready for you to add more.

One of the best places to experience the cult of paprika is in the Nagyvásárcsarnok, the “Great Market Hall”, downtown on the Pest side of the river by Fővám square and Liberty Bridge.  The ground floor has oodles of stalls selling paprika on one side, because of course the tourists want to take some home.  The center area is dedicated to produce, but the second floor, a small area just to one side, has food stalls, and here is where you should head after you’ve bought some paprika to be used for holiday gifts this year.  A bowl of goulash may be a given, but the other stuff they can scoop up for you is just as red and paprika-jacked.  They’ll give you a variety of stuff, but it will all taste vaguely the same, all of that magic red powder.  By now your resistance is gone.

My wife and I did just that, getting a bowl of goulash, and pointing to various other dishes, from which the counter people scooped up samples until we forced them to stop.  I have to admit that I was a very fussy eater when I was a kid and my mom was making that goulash–I never liked it then, and wasn’t looking forward to it here at first.  The bowl the market people gave me was like soup, almost bright red, and it was simply brilliant.  I changed my mind on the spot.

Your market meal may look like this.

I’m not much of a dessert fan, but the Hungarians make use of several flavors in their desserts that taste familiar yet different, such as chestnuts and sour cherries.  Like other Euros, they have a strong tradition of desserts, and you’ll do fine here.

While you’re eating, might as well drink the wine.  Hungarian beer is sometimes acceptable, but it’s not a beer culture.  Dreher is the common person’s brew, the one national light lager that all countries must produce.  The wine is much better–Hungarian wine is just as underrated as the food.  The most well-known is sadly a sweet one from the Tokaj region in the northeast.  The second-best known is Bikavér, known as “Bull’s Blood”, a hearty red but not very sophisticated, the type of thing you drink when in college.

My opinion is good reds come from the Villány southern region, and also from the northern Eger region.  The white wines of the country are usually full-bodied, dry, and have a bit of an edge (almost as if they were jacked with you-know-what-spice).

An excellent attraction near the castle on the Buda side of the river is The House of Hungarian wines, a large wine store and tasting bar that will lead you through any region or type of wine.  It’s strictly for tourists, but no place else is better set up to lead you through Hungary’s wines, and I approve of any tourist attraction that is popping corks.  Various other wine bars are springing up around the city.

Budapest is an international city.  If you want to avoid paprika, it’s easy.  We ate Scandinavian food and Persian food while we were there, and you’ll have no problem finding other stuff.  So very many restaurants have English (or German) menus because the Hungarians recognize that no one is going to learn their language–a translated menu is not indicative of a tourist trap.  The only area of the city to avoid when eating is Váci Street, the main pedestrian shopping street downtown.  Eating there is like eating on Paris’ Champs-Élysées.  But elsewhere, even in the increasingly touristy market or along the river, we found wonderful food, and what a pleasure to discover that Hungary is a food destination, among its many other charms.  Sit down to a plate of bright-red food and be happy.