We arrived in Budapest at night, which meant the city withheld itself. Just streetlights, the occasional lit window, the Danube reduced to a dark ribbon we crossed without ceremony.
It was Friday, nearly eleven, and the hunger was the kind that made you stupid. Too tired to be discerning, too late to find anywhere good still open.
We ended up at McDonald’s.
The self-service terminal greeted us in Hungarian, but with one tap of the screen—mercifully, depressingly—we could switch it to English. The menu revealed itself to be exactly the same as everywhere else, bar the pepper and onion potato strips I only noticed after ordering.
It was only later that I learnt this particular McDonald’s opened in 1988 on Régi Posta Street in the 5th district. The first in Budapest. The first glimpse, for teenagers living under communism, that the West—that gleaming, impossible idea—was one step closer. That you could taste it, literally, in the form of a Big Mac. Teenagers lined up here in 1988 for something I now ate sheepishly, apologetically, because I was too tired to find “authentic” Hungarian food on my first night in Budapest.
The irony wasn’t lost on me. Nothing about this trip was authentic in the way I usually try to engineer authenticity. This was a press trip with Jet2 and VisitBudapest, who chose the hotel, the restaurants, the itinerary. I was here to follow someone else’s vision of what Budapest should be, which meant I was absolved of the exhausting work of curation. Sometimes though, this is the best way to encounter a city: surrendered, surprised, letting someone else decide where you should look.
→Planning your own trip to Hungary? Based on this travelogue, I’ve written a complete Budapest travel guide where I break down where to eat, what to see, which thermal baths to choose, and what’s actually worth your time and money.
The gates that lead nowhere
The next morning our small group gathered outside the Hilton Budapest on Castle Hill. A hotel that had done something strange and specific with history: it was built around the ruins of the Dominican Saint Nicholas Cloister, which dated from the mid-13th century. The remains didn’t sit politely to one side as decoration, they cut straight through the building, separating it into northern and southern wings. Medieval stone and modern glass, coexisting.
Our guide was Andrea, and within the first ten minutes it became clear that she was one of those rare people who could make you fall in love not just with a place, but with the act of paying attention itself. She spoke four languages—Hungarian, English, German, Dutch—and worked as an interpreter and philologist when she wasn’t leading tourists up this hill. Over the next three days, she would beguile us with stories from her travels, each one offered not as credential but as gift.
She gestured toward the Danube below—”There, you see, the Chain Bridge, built in 1849“—and then paused. “But of course, none of this would have been possible without Empress Elisabeth’s influence on Franz Joseph.”
Sissi. She said the name with the kind of warmth you reserve for a friend you’ve known your whole life.
Andrea returned to Empress Elisabeth again and again over the next three days. “She was the Princess Diana of her time,” she told us. Beautiful, trapped, beloved, tragic. A woman who belonged to an empire but couldn’t belong to herself.
The details accumulated as we explored Castle Hill: Elisabeth was Bavarian, thrust into the rigid Habsburg court at sixteen. Four children, but her mother-in-law took them from her, raised them according to Habsburg protocol. Elisabeth found the court suffocating. She escaped to Hungary whenever she could, drawn to its relative freedom. She learnt Hungarian, developed a deep kinship with the country and its people, helped bring about the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary in 1867. The Hungarians loved her for it. Still do.
“She comes here,” Andrea said, sweeping her hand to indicate not just the castle but the whole country, “and she can breathe.”
We were hurried away from the view—away from the sunshine, the river, the open air—and shepherded indoors to St. Stephen’s Hall. I’m not someone who naturally gravitates toward ornate architecture, but what surprised me wasn’t the hall itself—though we’d get there—but what came before it.
In the Cercle Room, I stopped completely. It was a contemporary art installation by Sámuel Havadtoy: a meditation on doors and gates as symbols of beginnings, endings, and the fragile founding of the Hungarian state. Doorways that led nowhere. Gates that framed emptiness. Thresholds you could stand in but not cross. The installation was spare, almost austere, which made it breathe in a way the ornate historical hall—waiting just beyond—could not.
I didn’t expect contemporary art in a reconstructed Baroque palace, and certainly didn’t expect to be moved by the space between things. Havadtoy’s doors and gates spoke to fragility in a way the jewel box of St Stephen’s Hall refused to. They said: nothing is certain. Every beginning contains its ending.
Eventually, I followed the group into St. Stephen’s Hall itself. A room that was destroyed in World War II and then rebuilt, piece by painstaking piece, based on archival photographs and collective memory. In 1897, architect Alajos Hauszmann proposed a “Hungarian-style hall” to Emperor Franz Joseph, designed as a jewel box where every surface could be ornate, precious and intricate. He hired the finest craftspeople: Endre Thék for the walnut panelling, Vilmos Zsolnay for the majolica tiles and imposing fireplace. The room won a grand prize at the 1900 Paris Exposition.
Then it was bombed. Then it was gone.
In 2021, 121 years after it won that prize in Paris, it reopened, rebuilt “in a manner entirely faithful to the original.” It was exactly what you’d imagine: overwhelming, meticulous, gilded, a testament to turn-of-the-century excess and skill.
But I kept thinking about the room before this one. The gates that led nowhere. The doors that framed emptiness.
The emperor's pancake
By the time we arrived at Ida, we were all starving. The restaurant announced itself immediately: grandiose interior, long bar, grand piano, mirrored back wall, towering ceiling with domed vault, white linen tablecloths. Elegant without being stiff.
The restaurant was named after Ida Lafite—Franciska “IDA” Lafite—a governess born in Graz who became the wife of Miklós Ybl, the architect whose work was everywhere in this city. The Várkert Bazaar, the Opera House, the dome of St. Stephen’s Basilica; all Ybl. And behind him, supposedly, was Ida. “Behind every successful man stands a strong woman,” the restaurant’s literature reminded us.
The menu was exactly what you’d expect from a restaurant billing itself as Austro-Hungarian: schnitzel, goulash, paprikash, dumplings, strudel. These were the dishes that survived the empire’s dissolution, foods that now belonged to multiple countries—Austria and Hungary, yes, but also Czechia, Slovakia, Croatia, parts of Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Italy—each insisting on their own authentic version.
I ordered the Wiener Schnitzel with potato salad. It was enormous, a thin, breaded cutlet of veal that almost extended past the edges of the plate, golden and crisp. The potato salad was vinegary, simple. There was no surprise here, no twist, no chef’s “interpretation.” Just schnitzel, made correctly, the way it had been made for over a century.
Dessert menus arrived, and I knew immediately I couldn’t manage it. But I watched with specific jealousy as several companions ordered the Kaiserschmarrn with apricot jam and apple purée, a lightly sweetened pancake, shredded and caramelised, that took its name from Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I.
Franz Joseph again. The emperor whose portrait hung in St. Stephen’s Hall, who ruled for 68 years over an empire that would dissolve shortly after his death. The man Sissi married at sixteen, the man she fled from repeatedly.
And here was his pancake, still being served in restaurants across Vienna and Budapest, outlasting the empire, outlasting the emperor himself. Food as monument. Food as memory.
When it was offered, I stole a small forkful. It tasted like something an emperor might eat in private, away from state dinners, when he just wanted something comforting and simple and good. It tasted, honestly, like the best thing I’d eaten all day. I immediately regretted not ordering my own.
The river that divides and connects
The cruise left at precisely the moment when the light began its shift from afternoon to something else. Not quite evening yet, but no longer day, that in-between hour when the sky softened and the city started to glow from within.
The boat was modest and functional, the kind of tourist vessel that ran this route multiple times daily. We pulled away from the dock and the city began to reveal itself as skyline, as silhouette, as architecture arranged for maximum effect. The sun was dropping low behind Buda Castle, backlighting the hill we’d climbed that morning, and the effect was almost embarrassingly perfect. The Parliament caught the golden light and held it, the stone warming to amber, the spires and turrets suddenly making sense in a way they hadn’t from the ground.
Someone behind me said something about The Grand Budapest Hotel. About how the Parliament building looked just like Wes Anderson’s fictional hotel, that same ornate excess, those impossible spires and turrets rising against the sky.
They were right, in a way. Though I knew Anderson never filmed here. It was Görlitz, Germany, mostly, with the hotel itself a construction of production design and imagination. But the hotel itself was inspired by another Budapest landmark—the Gellért Hotel—designed by Hungarian architects Ármin Hegedűs, Artúr Sebestyén and Izidor Sterk, whose pre-war glamour faded under decades of communism into grim Soviet-style functionality—exactly like Anderson’s fictional Grand Budapest.
The world Anderson created, drawn from Stefan Zweig’s writings about Central European café society and the decline of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was drawn from places exactly like this. From cities that built monuments to imperial power, and then watched those empires dissolve, leaving behind the architecture as evidence, as ghost, as tourist attraction.
The Parliament building was completed in 1902, when Budapest was still part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, still one of Europe’s great capitals, still flush with the confidence that comes from believing your world will last forever. By 1918, the empire was gone. By 1945, much of the building around it was destroyed. By 1989, communism ended. And through it all, the Parliament sat on the Danube, that neo-Gothic confection, being photographed in golden light by tourists on river cruises who may or may not have been thinking about Wes Anderson.
Anderson’s film understands something true about this part of Europe. How beauty persists despite destruction, how elegance and tragedy coexist, how places can be simultaneously magnificent and melancholy. Standing on this boat, watching the Parliament glow in the dying light, I understood why people made the connection even if it wasn’t literally accurate. The aesthetic was right. That sense of faded grandeur, of something magnificent that survived precisely because it was too beautiful to completely destroy.
The Danube literally divides this city into two parts, Buda and Pest, hill and flat, old and new, residential and commercial. It’s the reason Budapest exists as Budapest and not as two separate cities. It connects and separates in the same gesture. It has been crossed and re-crossed for over a thousand years. Armies have fought for control of its bridges. Lovers have met on its banks. Bodies have been thrown into it during wartime and peacetime and the long, complicated stretches in between.
The boat turned, beginning the loop back toward the dock, and for a moment we were facing away from the Parliament, looking instead toward the castle, toward Fisherman’s Bastion, toward the hill that held so much of the city’s history. The light was almost gone now, the sky deepening to navy, the first stars attempting to assert themselves against the city’s glow.
Globalisation's glorious trap
I love a good food market, but I’m always skeptical of markets that arrive as part of a franchise, especially one as aggressively global as Time Out. Lisbon, New York, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, Dubai, Cape Town, Porto, Barcelona, Bahrain, Osaka. And now Budapest.
Time Out Market Budapest had opened less than a week before our visit, which meant everything was shiny and new. It sat inside the restored Corvin Palace, a 1926 neoclassical department store on Blaha Lujza Square. The crowd surprised me: not gaggles of young tourists but multi-generational post-work groups, locals who’d come to see what this new thing was: whether it belonged here, whether it was for them.
We moved through the stalls, sampling. The food was excellent. This wasn’t mediocre tourist fare dressed up with mood lighting. Premium Hungarian cold cuts and cheeses from Michelin-starred chef Jenő Rácz. Layered potatoes and goulash soup from Szaletly. Chewy-crisp Margherita pizza from Michelin Bib Gourmand-awarded Anyukám Mondta. Hungarian desserts: Madártej—floating islands—and Almond Cake with Gorgonzola Ice Cream from LIRA by Essência Restaurant.
The cake was lovely. The Gorgonzola ice cream was an acquired taste. I don’t like blue cheese, and no amount of Michelin stars was going to change that. It was still a no from me.
The cocktails were each named after a bridge that crossed the Danube; a nice touch. I ordered Margaret Bridge: Lillet, elderflower, herbal soda. Floral and refreshing and dangerously easy to drink.
The food was good. The space was beautiful. This was globalisation’s gorgeous trap. It’s not that the experience was bad, it’s that the experience was good, so good that you almost didn’t notice you were eating the same curated excellence you could eat in Lisbon or Dubai or Chicago, with only the bridge-named cocktails and the goulash soup to remind you you were in Budapest.
By the time we reached The Duchess, night had fully committed. The rooftop bar sat atop the Matild Palace, and the vibe was chill but exclusive in that specific way luxury spaces have perfected. The décor was all plush velvet, art deco touches and carefully calibrated mood lighting. Every surface had been considered. Every angle was Instagram-ready.
I ordered the Tenshin—The Shift: San Cosme Mezcal, brown miso, wakame, cantaloupe melon, lime. It arrived garnished with a tortilla chip topped with wakame, which was… intriguing. The kind of garnish that existed to be photographed but added nothing to the actual drinking experience.
The cocktail itself was earthy and smoky, not for the faint-hearted, which was exactly what I wanted. I loved it. The person next to me took a sip and made a face that suggested they did not love it, which somehow made me love it more.
Where worldly and spiritual meet
Every Budapest travel guide tells you to visit the Parliament building and St. Stephen’s Basilica, and they’re right, but the real revelation is the walk between them, through streets that gradually shift character, revealing how the city negotiates between monument and everyday life.
Sunday morning in Budapest arrived with a particular quality of mercy: the city had given itself permission to move slowly. We met Andrea in the lobby, ready for Pest, the flat side, the commercial side, where the city did its daily work of being a capital.
We started at the Parliament building, that massive neo-Gothic structure sitting on the Danube’s eastern bank. Designed by Imre Steindl and opened in 1902, it had been the largest building in Budapest since its completion. Andrea told us how it was designed to house the National Assembly after the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 gave Hungary more autonomy within the empire, how it survived World War II relatively intact while so much of Budapest burnt, and how it now housed a democracy that was complicated, imperfect, contested.
We walked from the Parliament toward St. Stephen’s Basilica, the streets gradually shifting, becoming less monumental, more commercial. The basilica announced itself before you saw it, it’s massive neo-classical dome rising 96 metres, exactly the same height as the Parliament building. “This equation symbolises that worldly and spiritual thinking have the same importance,” Andrea reminded us.
It was Sunday, which meant the main part of the church was closed for services, mass in progress, the faithful inside, tourists politely redirected. This suited me fine. I’m agnostic, atheist, somewhere in that territory where other people’s faith is something I respect without sharing. Everyone has the right to their beliefs, to worship however they see fit, and I have no interest in intruding upon that. Better to stay outside, to witness the architecture, to let the building speak for itself.
Instead we took the elevator up to the viewing platform. Sunday morning Pest spread out below, waking slowly. Church bells rang from multiple directions. From up here, the 96-metre equation between worldly and spiritual power felt less like symbolism and more like city planning: two buildings of equal height creating visual balance, anchoring the skyline.
Andrea pointed out landmarks: Andrássy Avenue stretching toward Heroes’ Square, the Great Market Hall’s Zsolnay-tiled roof, the Jewish Quarter where we were headed next. “You see there,” she said, gesturing toward a specific neighbourhood, “that was the ghetto. The border ran along Dohány Street.”
From up here, there was no visible border. Just buildings, streets, the democratic sprawl of urban life. But borders don’t disappear just because you can’t see them from 96 metres up.
We descended the winding staircase from the basilica’s viewing platform and walked to Vörösmarty Square, where Gerbeaud Café sat like it had been there forever, which it more or less had, since 1858. The interior delivered exactly what it promised: high ceilings, chandeliers, marble tables, the particular elegance of early 20th-century café culture. The walls were cream and gold, the furniture dark wood and velvet the colour of wine.
The pastry case was obscene. Rows and rows of cakes, tortes, slices, each one more elaborate than the last.
Our tasting menu included three cakes. The Gerbeaud Slice was my immediate favourite. Layers of walnut and apricot jam sandwiched between thin pastry, topped with dark chocolate. Not too sweet, the walnuts providing texture and a slight bitterness that balanced the jam’s sweetness. The Royal Chocolate Cake was dense, rich, unapologetically chocolate. The Blackberry Yoghurt Cake was lighter, fresher.
Andrea told us about the café’s history and how it survived World War II, operated under communism, then reopened after 1989. “But the Gerbeaud Slice,” she said, “that hasn’t changed. Same recipe, same technique, same walnut-apricot-chocolate combination that Émile Gerbeaud created.
The border you can't see from 96 metres up
From Gerbeaud, the walk to the Jewish Quarter took us through streets that gradually shifted in character. Pest’s 7th district, where Budapest’s Jewish community established itself in the 19th century and where, in 1944, the Nazis established the Budapest Ghetto.
The Dohány Street Synagogue appeared suddenly, its distinctive onion domes and Moorish Revival architecture making it look like it belonged in Andalusia rather than Central Europe. Built between 1854 and 1859, it was designed by Viennese architect Ludwig Förster, who believed “no distinctively Jewish architecture could be identified” and thus chose Islamic models from North Africa and medieval Spain. The result was stunning. The largest synagogue in Europe, seating 3,000 people.
Andrea explained that the complex consisted of the Great Synagogue, the Heroes’ Temple, a graveyard, a memorial, and the Jewish Museum, built on the site where Theodor Herzl was born. He was born here. On this street. In a house that no longer existed but whose location was marked. Andrea stopped us on the street outside the synagogue. “Here,” she said, gesturing to the pavement beneath our feet. “This was the border.“
Dohány Street; a leafy, pleasant street in the city centre now. In 1944, this street was the western boundary of the Budapest Ghetto, where 70,000 Jews were forced into an area of less than 0.1 square miles. Sealed off by wooden fences and brick walls. Guarded. Cut off from food, medicine and heat during one of the coldest winters on record. Andrea then told us about the liberation in January 1945, when Soviet forces reached Budapest. By the time the Red Army liberated the ghetto, thousands had died from starvation, disease, cold, violence. But thousands survived. Which was its own kind of miracle.
We walked deeper into the 7th district, and the neighborhood shifted again: ruin bars, vintage shops, street art and bustling cafés. The Jewish Quarter has become hip and desirable, the kind of neighborhood that appears in travel guides under headings like “Where to Go Out in Budapest” and “The City’s Coolest District.“
This is where we’ll end up later tonight, at Szimpla Kert, the original ruin bar, the one that pioneered the aesthetic of drinking in crumbling buildings, of turning decay into atmosphere, of making beauty from neglect. But right now, in Sunday morning light, the district feels quieter, caught between its traumatic past and its gentrified present, trying to figure out what it means to be both a memorial site and a nightlife destination.
Lunch at TATI felt like a deliberate shift after the morning’s immersion in heritage and history. Where Gerbeaud traded on 140 years of unchanged recipes, TATI announced itself as something different: contemporary, seasonal, farm-to-table in the most literal sense (they had their own farm).
I ordered the chicken paprikash. It felt like the inevitable choice, I’d been circling this dish all weekend, hearing about it, seeing it on menus, understanding it as quintessentially Hungarian. If I was going to eat chicken paprikash, it should be here, at a restaurant staking its reputation on elevating traditional dishes while honouring their origins.
While we waited, I ordered a Nature’s Negroni; negroni cut with nettle and hay. When it arrived, it was perfect. The bitterness of the Campari was still there, but softened, rounded out by something earthy and vegetal. It was the kind of cocktail that made you understand why people care about craft bartending, why ingredients matter, and why taking something classic and adjusting it thoughtfully can result in something better than the original.
I made a mental note: come back to TATI just for this negroni.
The chicken paprikash arrived, beautiful and carefully plated. The waiter, delivering it with evident pride, told me it was “the best in the city.“
I took a bite.
It was… fine.
Good, even. The chicken was perfectly cooked, tender and moist. The sauce was clearly made with quality paprika, cream, probably stock that took hours to develop. The technique was flawless.
But I was underwhelmed.
Maybe it was that I hadn’t tasted the version at IDA to compare. Maybe chicken paprikash—for all its reputation as the quintessential Hungarian dish—just wasn’t speaking to me the way I’d hoped. Maybe I was expecting something transformative, some moment of culinary revelation, and instead I was just eating very good chicken in paprika sauce.
When craft becomes performance
The Hungarian State Opera House sat on Andrássy Avenue like a jewel in a velvet box; ornate and perfectly proportioned. Built between 1875 and 1884, and designed by the one and only Miklós Ybl, it was neo-Renaissance with Baroque elements, which meant every surface was decorated.
Andrea told us: “Although in size and capacity it is not among the greatest, in beauty and the quality of acoustics the Budapest Opera House is considered to be amongst the finest opera houses in the world.“
Not the biggest, but the best. It was a very Hungarian claim.
I’d never been to the opera before. Never really felt the urge, if I’m honest. Opera had always seemed like one of those things that existed in a separate cultural sphere, requiring knowledge I didn’t have. But a short performance in a building like this? That I could do.
We entered through heavy doors and immediately the interior delivered on every promise the exterior made. Marble staircases. Gilded railings. Frescoes on the ceiling. Chandeliers. Everything was red velvet and gold leaf and the particular kind of opulence that announced: art happens here, and art requires beauty.
The auditorium seated maybe 1,200 people—intimate by opera house standards—but the horseshoe shape, the multiple tiers of boxes rising toward the ceiling, the frescoes depicting the nine Muses delivered a sense of hushed awe.
Back out on the main staircase, we settled onto the cold marble steps for a short performance. I didn’t know what she was singing. I didn’t recognise the aria, didn’t understand the Italian. But I understood, immediately and completely, why people built buildings like this. Because a human voice, trained to do what this woman’s voice was doing, needed space to exist in. It needed architecture that could hold it, amplify it, let it breathe and resonate and fill every corner with sound that you didn’t just hear but felt in your chest, your throat, your bones.
The First Strudel House of Pest was a family-owned restaurant that opened in 2007 with the explicit mission of preserving “the true Hungarian tradition of strudel-making.” The restaurant has leaned into its mission, turned preservation into performance, made the act of watching someone stretch dough into entertainment.
A young man in traditional dress stood with a ball of dough, a floured table, and an audience of people with cameras at the ready. Stretching strudel dough, he told us through a translator, was “a true form of art that had been perfected for centuries.” The goal was to make the dough so thin you could read a newspaper through it.
He worked the dough with his hands, pulling gently from the centre, working his way around the edges, stretching incrementally, patiently. His hands moved with the kind of confidence that came from repetition, from doing the same thing hundreds of times until it became automatic, muscle memory.
It was mesmerising to watch, the transformation from small ball to large translucent sheet, the precarious thinness that suggested one careless movement would destroy the whole thing.
The now-baked strudel arrived at our table still warm: one classic túró (cottage cheese), one apple.
I was underwhelmed, if I’m honest.
The cottage cheese strudel was… fine. The pastry was thin and flaky, exactly as promised, but the filling retained that cottage cheese texture I really wasn’t a fan of. The apple strudel was better, but still disappointing. As a lover of British apple crumble, I found the strudel lacked the comforting spice I associated with cooked apples. No cinnamon to speak of, no warmth, just apples and sugar and pastry that was technically impressive but emotionally unsatisfying.
The restaurant buzzed with customers though, every table full, so I was clearly in the minority.
When playfulness wins
Between the strudel house and dinner, we were granted a brief reprieve: an hour back at the hotel to shower, change, shed the accumulated exhaustion of a day spent absorbing culture and craft and cake. By the time we reconvened in the lobby, the light had shifted to that blue-grey dusk that made cities look their most cinematic.
We were headed to BIBO, Dani García’s restaurant on the top floor of the Dorothea Hotel. If I were writing a traditional Budapest travel guide, I’d list this as “upscale fusion restaurant with Danube views.” But that misses what makes BIBO special: the willingness to be playful with tradition, to ask “what if goulash was a croquette?” and deliver an answer that makes you laugh with delight.
The street entrance to the rooftop restaurant immediately announced itself as Something, a play of metal spheres and reflective surfaces, a game of illusion that drew your eye. The lift took us up to the top floor. More spheres, more mirrors. The bar area glowed with warm light, the petrol blue and burnt orange and salmon of the seating creating a colour palette that shouldn’t work but did, jewel tones against dark surfaces, giant glass flowers floating overhead.
We were led to a private dining room at the back. The space was beautiful, intimate, dominated by a large moon painting that took up most of one wall. We settled around a long table, white linens, wine glasses already set. Six courses with wine pairings, showcasing Chef Dani García’s approach to fusion, taking Spanish techniques and sensibilities, pairing them with Hungarian ingredients and traditions, and creating something that belonged to both cultures and neither.
The first course arrived: guacamole, burrata, soya beans. Mexican, Italian, Asian. A statement of intent: we’re not bound by the two cuisines in the restaurant’s name. We’re pulling from everywhere.
The second course was the one that made me laugh. Goulash reimagined as a croquette, served atop a warm sculpture of a hand. The exterior golden and crispy, the interior revealing itself as concentrated goulash: rich, meaty, and intensely flavoured with paprika. It took a dish that was usually about abundance and made it elegant, portable, a single perfect bite. This was the moment where I understood what contemporary Hungarian cuisine could be when it wasn’t trying to preserve tradition but instead using tradition as a starting point for invention.
The third course was poetry. “The foie that wanted to be a cherry“—the phrasing alone was worth the price of admission. Foie gras presented as a cherry, served with sour cherry compote. Whimsy and technical showmanship.
The fourth course was the most overtly fusion: krumplis tészta reimagined with paccheri, roasted octopus, soy sabayon, kimchi paprika. Every element pulling from a different culinary tradition, but it worked. The octopus was tender, charred at the edges. The kimchi paprika added heat and funk. And underneath it all, the ghost of krumplis tészta—potatoes and pasta—humble Hungarian comfort food anchoring this complicated construction.
The fifth course was a palate reset: beef tenderloin, classic and simple. Perfect execution rather than innovation.
The final course brought us back to strudel, but not the strudel we’d had that afternoon. This was BIBO’s version: deconstructed, reimagined, incorporating yellow beetroot and orange alongside the traditional apple. After the afternoon’s traditional demonstration, this felt like a direct response. I respect the tradition, I understand the craft, but I’m not interested in replicating it.
And I preferred this. The beetroot added depth, the orange cut through the sweetness, the pastry provided texture without overwhelming. It was playful without being precious, contemporary without being alienating.
We finished, full and slightly drunk on wine and satisfaction. Through the windows, Budapest glowed in the dark. The Danube reflecting city lights, the bridges illuminated, the Parliament building doing its night-time work of being spectacularly beautiful.
When the city closes its doors
Monday morning arrived colder and gloomier than the previous days. The sky was low and grey, threatening rain but not quite committing, and we were bundled in jackets we hadn’t needed yesterday.
We started at the Great Market Hall, the practical beginning to our final day in Budapest. The market was already loud, crowded, alive with the particular energy of a place where locals and tourists negotiated the same space with different purposes. Locals needed vegetables for the week. Tourists needed paprika to bring home as proof they were here.
The building itself was impossible to miss with that distinctive Zsolnay-tiled roof in green and gold, catching the light. Built in 1897, it was designed by Samu Pecz, and is the largest and oldest indoor market in Budapest.
We entered through the main doors and the smell hit immediately: meat, cheese, bread, paprika, vegetables. The ground floor was produce, meats, pastries, candies, spices, spirits. Andrea navigated us through, pointing out the paprika stalls, rows and rows of red powder in varying shades and intensities. Tokaji wine in bottles that looked like they were designed in 1950 and never updated. Túró Rudi, a chocolate-covered cottage cheese bar, individually wrapped in red and white packaging. Kolbász sausage hanging in loops. Salami thick as your forearm. Pickled everything.
Afterwards, we headed to City Park (Liget in Hungarian), a massive public park that sits northeast of the city centre. The park’s main entrance was at Heroes’ Square, one of Hungary’s World Heritage sites, a vast plaza dominated by the Millennium Monument.
Except that morning, Heroes’ Square was cordoned off. Police barriers, security personnel, official cars with flags. After some digging, Andrea explained that Numan Kurtulmuş, Speaker of the Grand National Assembly of Türkiye, was here to lay a wreath at the Monument of the Unknown Soldier. We caught a glimpse from a distance—dark suits, solemn faces, diplomatic choreography—and then were ushered along, past the barriers, into the park.
City Park spread out before us: 302 acres, Europe’s largest-scale cultural urban development project, winner of the FIABCI World Prix d’Excellence for best urban development. The Liget Budapest Project has transformed this park over the last decade, adding new cultural institutions while preserving its character as public recreational space.
We were headed first to the Museum of Ethnography, currently the world’s most modern institution of ethnography, designed by Hungarian architect Marcel Ferencz. The building was spectacular from the outside, shaped like two intertwined hillsides, covered by a roof garden with an area of over 7,000 square metres.
Except that morning, the Museum of Ethnography was closed to the public for a film shoot. Budapest had become something of a hotbed for Hollywood productions and Netflix series lately. Andrea thought it might be for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem or possibly Dune: Messiah, though she wasn’t certain. The building was cordoned off, production vehicles parked nearby, crew members moving with purposeful efficiency.
It was disappointing and also kind of funny. We’d come to see the future of Budapest’s cultural development and we were blocked by the present reality of Budapest’s role in the global entertainment industry.
Nearby, the House of Music Hungary sat in the park like something that had landed there rather than been built, with a playfully undulating roof floating among the canopy of trees. Designed by Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto, the roof was inspired by the vibration of sound, its surface pierced by exactly 100 uniquely shaped light wells, allowing natural light to flow into the building.
We walked around the perimeter slowly, seeing how the building changed from each direction, how those 100 holes created different patterns depending on where you stood, how the grey morning light filtered through them.
It was Monday, which meant the building was closed. No interior access. Just the exterior, which was what we’d come to see anyway, the architecture itself and the way it sat in the park, the relationship between building and landscape. We circled the building slowly, taking photos from different angles, and then Andrea led us toward Vajdahunyad Castle, tucked deeper into the park.
The castle was a strange thing. Built in 1896 for the Millennial Exhibition, it was designed to showcase architectural styles from different periods and regions of Hungarian history. Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, and Baroque elements all coexisting in one fantastical structure.
“There’s something I want to show you,” Andrea said, leading us around to a quieter section of the castle grounds. The Béla Lugosi bust sat there, bronze and solemn. A tribute to the Hungarian actor born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó in 1882, who fled Hungary after the failed communist revolution in 1919 and eventually became synonymous with Dracula in the 1931 film.
Andrea told us how Lugosi became so associated with the character that he struggled to find other work, how by the time he died in 1956, he was buried in his Dracula cape. “The role made him famous,” she said, “but it also trapped him.”
There was something fitting about his bust being here, in a castle that was itself a performance of history, celebrating an actor who performed a character that wasn’t even Hungarian but became inextricably linked to Hungarian identity through Hollywood’s imagination. Bram Stoker never visited Hungary, but he set portions of Dracula here, drawing on Transylvanian folklore. The myth became intertwined with the place whether they wanted it or not.
I’d stood at Whitby Abbey just a few months earlier, filming a travel vlog on the Yorkshire coast. Whitby, where Bram Stoker actually stayed, where he walked the 199 steps up to the ruined abbey, where he set crucial scenes of Dracula. Where the count arrives in England aboard a shipwreck, a black dog leaping ashore. The abbey ruins are real, windswept, dramatic against the North Sea. Stoker saw them. Stoker wrote about them.
And yet here I was in Budapest, where Stoker never came, standing in front of a bust of a Hungarian actor commemorating his portrayal of a Transylvanian count written by an Irish author who based much of his novel on a place in Yorkshire. The geography of fiction doesn’t map neatly onto the geography of reality, but both places—Whitby and Budapest—carry the weight of the story now. Both have become Dracula sites, regardless of what Stoker intended or experienced.
By the time we reached Gundel, we were cold and hungry and ready to be inside somewhere warm. In the early 20th century, under Károly Gundel—once a protégé of César Ritz—this was among Central Europe’s most prestigious restaurants. A place where French refinement met Hungarian tradition.
Then: World War II. Communist rule. Decades of operating as a shadow version of itself. Post-1989, the slow work of restoration began. Then Covid. Then the rebranding, or reimagining, that tried to balance authenticity with a more contemporary outlook. The question underneath all of this: can you ever really go back?
Inside, the dining room was exactly what it needed to be: elegant without being stuffy, traditional without feeling like a museum. The N11 menu was explained to us: eleven iconic dishes selected from Károly Gundel’s 140 recipes, “ambassadors of Hungarian gastronomy internationally.“
I scanned the menu looking for something I hadn’t eaten yet this weekend, and landed on mangalica ragout gratin. Mangalica pork, that heritage breed with the curly hair and impossibly rich meat, slow-cooked into ragout and baked under a cheese crust.
It was obscenely rich. The pork had been cooked so long it was falling apart, melting into the sauce, which was deep and savoury and complex. The gratin top was golden and crispy, providing texture against the soft, yielding meat underneath. I’m drooling just thinking about it now, days later, back home.
I ate slowly, trying to make it last, knowing that I would probably never eat mangalica ragout this good again.
And then: Gundel palacsinta.
The restaurant’s most famous dish. A crêpe filled with rum-soaked raisins, walnuts, and lemon zest, served with rich chocolate sauce.
It was delicious. The rum had soaked into the raisins thoroughly, the walnuts provided crunch and slight bitterness, the lemon zest kept it from being cloying. The chocolate sauce was rich and slightly bitter, dark chocolate that didn’t pander but instead offered complexity.
It was also heavy. Very heavy. The kind of dessert that needed coffee, strong black coffee to cut through the richness, to make the experience complete.
But there was no time for coffee.
Andrea was checking her watch, apologising, explaining that we needed to leave now—right now—to make it to the spa on the other side of town where we had appointments beginning in mere minutes. The schedule had been disrupted all morning, and now we were behind.
The Mandala Day Spa was not what I’d expected when I’d seen “spa” and “Budapest” on the itinerary. I’d expected Széchenyi or Gellért, those grand historic bath complexes with Neo-Baroque architecture and outdoor pools steaming in cold air, water that had been flowing from natural hot springs for centuries.
Instead: Mandala Day Spa, a luxurious Oriental-themed retreat with four different pools (lukewarm, cold, pleasure, and hot), a Jacuzzi, steam room, sauna, a relaxing area with zero gravity swings and a bar. It was beautiful, modern and meticulously designed. It was also deeply impersonal in a way that made it indistinguishable from luxury spas in London, New York or Dubai.
This wasn’t even what we were supposed to be doing. The original plan had been Omorovicza Boutique & Spa,* a tour I’d been looking forward to, having used their face cleansing products before. But plans changed, as they do on press trips, and suddenly we were here instead, with a spa afternoon as the finale before the airport.
I’d bought a bathing suit hastily at Manchester Airport when the spa visit was added to the itinerary at the last minute. Now, standing in the changing room with that impulse-purchase suit, I made a calculation: get in the pools and then have to shower, dry off, repack wet things, and arrive at the airport damp and flustered. Or skip the water entirely.
I chose the massage. The twenty-minute foot treatment was everything my cobblestone-battered feet needed. The therapist was skilled and professional. My feet felt measurably better afterward. But I never tested the pools to experience whatever thermal or heated or carefully temperature-controlled water they contained. Just sat in a robe, sipping my mocktail, watching others move through the space, thinking about what I was missing and whether it mattered.
The whole experience felt like a pleasant interlude rather than an essential Budapest experience. This could be anywhere. This was the globalised wellness industry, polished and perfected, offering relaxation as a standardised product, and one I didn’t even fully participate in.
And I was grateful for it, genuinely. After three days of intensive tourism, it was a relief to just sit without having to think about history or architecture or what anything meant. To let someone massage my feet. To be horizontal for twenty minutes. To make a practical decision about not wanting to deal with wet hair on a flight.
But I would have preferred an authentic Hungarian thermal bath. Or the Omorovicza tour. Or more time at Gundel with that coffee I never got to finish.
Eventually, it was time to leave. We emerged from the spa’s dim interior back into late afternoon Budapest and found we had just enough time for one final stop before the airport.
SALT Bakery‘s pop-up on Zrínyi Street was still open, and we grabbed an assortment of pastries and cookies for the journey ahead. Across the street, CAUSE Café pulled proper espresso while we waited. It was a small mercy, that coffee, the one we hadn’t had time for at Gundel, arriving now at the trip’s end, strong and black and exactly right.
And then: the airport. The flight home. The city receding below us as we climbed, the Danube catching the light one last time, the bridges and buildings and all that complicated history becoming small, then smaller, then gone.
If you’re planning your own trip to Budapest—one where you control the itinerary, choose your own thermal baths, and have time to finish your coffee—I’ve distilled everything from this trip into a more practical Budapest travel guide here, which covers where to eat, what to see, which museums matter (imho) and an honest assessment of what’s skippable, in a (slightly) more digestable format.
This travelogue details a press trip where I was hosted by Jet2 and VisitBudapest. All thoughts and opinions are, as always, my own. All photography © Kate Baxter.