We have a couple more posts about Budapest – recap – we were there in November last year for a long weekend … click here, here and here to see some samples of earlier posts.

Pest-Buda Vendéglő (Pest-Buda Inn) is located on the Buda side of the city. It is described in a local guidebook as the place to try traditional Hungarian dish made according to grandma’s recipe.

The hotel concierge gave us two options when asked about traditional fare, Pest-Buda was one of them.

A 10-minute taxi ride across the Chain Bridge and up the Castle Hill (Fortuna utca 3) brought us to this homey bistro restaurant.

Sue started with Goulash soup with Csipetke. The name Csipetke comes from pinching small, fingernail-sized bits out of the dough (csipet =pinch) before adding them to the boiling soup. Sue ordered goulash soup every chance she had and none were as good as Pest-Buda.

I ordered the Hungarian fish soup. It was one of the best I have ever tasted. I like bouillabaisse (see earlier post here) and cioppino and this soup tastes more like cioppino.

Hungarian goulash is the most famous and often cooked dish outside the borders of Hungary. So that’s what I ordered. Hungarian goulash is neither a soup nor a stew, it’s somewhere in between. Though in Hungary it’s considered a soup rather than a stew. Mine came with egg barley. A herd of cattle is gulya and herdsman is gulyás in Hungarian, so that’s where the dish’s name comes from.

 

We heard a lot of English in the restaurant. So we suspect that this is an establishment that caters to a lot of tourists but it is not touristy. While this is not where the locals go, we trust that the food is not too far off the authentic.

I had a glass of Hungarian Cabernet Franc (from Villány or Szekszárd, I can’t remember) which was tannic, robust and matched the goulash perfectly.

Sue ordered a chicken ragout with garlic potato. The garlic blended in with the other flavors very well. Both our main courses were very good, home-style comfort food, and strangely, neither one tasted particularly exotic or ethnic, even though we were very far from our homes.

Like every tourist who visits Hungary and buys paprika, we bought both sweet and spicy paprika powders as well as the sweet and spicy creams for making goulash which already contains some of the other species.

Now we have a reliable idea of how a goulash is supposed to look and taste like. Let’s see if we can replicate some aspects of it at home.