What to eat in Budapest, from soup pot to cake stand

Any honest answer to the question of what to eat in Budapest begins with a spoon. Hungarians describe themselves as a nation of soup eaters, and a meal without a bowl of soup hardly counts as a meal at home.¹¹ The list of everyday soups runs from goulash with beef cubes and vegetables to fish soup made with carp, catfish or pike-perch, chicken and bean soups, and a cold fruit soup that turns up in summer.¹² Order one as a starter and you will understand the rhythm of a Hungarian lunch.

You probably know goulash by name already, but it is not the thick stew sold under that name abroad. Károly Gundel, the great restaurateur, defined it as a soup rich in broth, onions and paprika, with cubed potatoes and small pinched noodles called csipetke.¹ The Hungarikum Committee adds that a good goulash is never thickened and depends on quality paprika.² If a bowl arrives dense and floury, you have been served something else. Look for a clear red broth, soft potato and a slick of paprika oil on top.

Fish soup is the other great pot, and it divides the country into two camps. The tourism agency names the schools after the towns of Baja and Szeged: Baja soup is cooked from carp in a simpler way, while the Szeged version mixes several fish and is passed through a sieve.¹³ At Christmas many families still eat it, with pasta in the Baja style and without in Szeged.⁹ It is spicy, rust-red and filling, so treat it as a main course rather than a starter if you are planning dessert.

Some of the best things to eat in Budapest are the dishes Hungarians cook at home. Stuffed cabbage, rolls of cabbage leaf filled with minced pork, belongs to the colder months, and lecsó, a pepper and tomato stew often compared to ratatouille, peaks in late summer.²⁸ Rakott krumpli layers potatoes with eggs and sausage, and túrós csusza, pasta with curd cheese and bacon, is the country's favourite noodle dish.³⁴ These are filling plates, built for cold days and long lunches.

Túró, the curd cheese in that pasta, deserves its own mention. It is a fresh, white and crumbly cheese with a sour flavour, and it turns up in savoury dishes and desserts alike.³⁵ Spread with paprika and caraway it becomes körözött, a favourite at the Hungarian breakfast table.³⁶ If a menu lists something with túró and you have never tried it, order it: the taste is closer to a tangy ricotta than to cottage cheese, and it is one of the flavours that make Hungarian food distinct.

Főzelék is easy to overlook. It is a thick vegetable main course, cooked from peas, spinach, green beans, potatoes, lentils or Savoy cabbage, and it works for vegetarians and, with the right thickening, for vegans too.³³ Canteens serve it with a fried egg or a slice of meat on top. Casserole dishes such as layered cabbage also appear on top restaurant menus now, a sign that home cooking has moved into fine dining.^20,33

Hungary's cake list is long, and the tourism agency names Dobos and Esterházy as the most iconic.⁶ Dobos is a sponge layered with chocolate buttercream and capped with a hard caramel top.⁴⁰ It was first shown at the National General Exhibition of Budapest in 1885, and its creator, the Budapest chef and delicatessen owner József Dobos, handed his recipe to the confectioners' guild in 1906.^17,48 Ask for a slice with an espresso and crack the caramel with the edge of your fork.

Somlói galuska is the dessert children ask for. It was first made for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair by Béla József Szőcs, once the confectioner of the Gundel restaurant.^7,49 Its first recipe stacks plain, cocoa and walnut sponge, three types in all, each soaked in rum syrup and spread with vanilla cream, raisins and walnuts, before it is torn into spoonfuls under whipped cream and chocolate sauce.³¹ It is messy by design, and that is how you know it is right.

Other sweets fill the gaps between meals. Gundel pancakes wrap walnuts and rum and arrive drowned in dark chocolate sauce, while túrógombóc are sweet curd dumplings.⁵⁰ Hungary also invented the walnut and apricot zserbó slice and the apricot and curd Rákóczi túrós.⁶ Rétes, the Hungarian strudel, is most often filled with poppy seeds, sweetened curd, apple or sour cherries.⁴¹ A bakery window full of these is the cheapest dessert tour in the city.