Budapest / Hungary
3 May 2019
Hungary is famous for its excellent food, as traditional Hungarian cuisine is among the best and richest in Europe. The country is a land where people’s love of food make eating out an enjoyable experience for anyone who comes here. Creative recipes, quality ingredients, and friendly service meet in the country’s gastronomy, offering a vivid fusion of authentic and modern meals.
Hungary is famous for its excellent food, as traditional Hungarian cuisine is among the best and richest in Europe. The country is a land where people’s love of food make eating out an enjoyable experience for anyone who comes here. Creative recipes, quality ingredients, and friendly service meet in the country’s gastronomy, offering a vivid fusion of authentic and modern meals.
To taste the full flavour of Hungary’s traditional cuisine, one must consider the country’s past, as the mixture of Slavic, German, Italian and Asiatic components have all added their different tastes to the melting pot. Nomadic traditions gave rise to a predilection for meat dishes and soups and stews cooked over a campfire. Goulash or Gulyás is our national dish, but In Hungary it means a rich soup instead of stew. The stew that most people associate with Hungary is actually called pörkölt. Imported herbs like garlic and vegetables like aubergine and cabbage, gave rise to stuffed vegetable dishes. Germanic influences from Austria can still be seen in the fancy cream cakes, strudel and even wiener schnitzel, which is very prevalent here too.
The differences between the terrain and climate of regions of the country have also contributed to the diversity of Hungarian cuisine and for example, fish, especially catfish from Lake Balaton are heavily-used. The sunny southern great plain grows great vegetables, such as strong onions and fiery chilli peppers, the origin of the spice paprika, which plays such an important part in nearly every Hungarian dish.
Back in the year 1912, there were over 300 cafés and confectioners in Budapest. Today, even though the current gastronomic revolution that has taken over Hungary in the past few years, the number of bistros and confectioners is not nearly that many, but there are still plenty of them.
Compensating this fact, the new restaurants and street food places have been opening on almost every corner in the capital city. These can provide multi-course meals with tasting the best wines of the country, or authentic Hungarian dishes like fish soup spiced with paprika (‘halászlé’), stuffed cabbage with sour cream (‘töltött káposzta’), or some distinctive specialties as the chimney cake (‘kürtőskalács’) or lángos.
Fine dining enthusiasts have a wide range of premium places to choose from as well. Today Budapest is proud to have six high-class restaurants honoured with a Michelin star (Onyx**, Costes*, Costes Downtown*, Borkonyha*, Babel*, Stand*) that offer outstanding food presented in an artistic and spectacular way, with excellent service. In 2015 and 2016 Hungary also put its name on the global map of gastronomy by winning the right to host the international Chaîne des Rôtisseurs Young Chef of the Year Competition and the European finals of Bocuse d’Or, respectively.
Visitors to Hungary will definitely find something for themselves in the large selection of dining.
In addition, Hungary is home to a wide spectrum of outstanding wines. The country has 22 wine-growing sub-regions with countless small cellars where visitors can taste the selection of locally produced delicacies and a few wineries where it is even possible to blend their own cuvée wines.
These wineries are run by a new generation of wine growers who mix traditional viticulture and modern technology in their production process, which results in excellent quality wines from locations like Lake Balaton, Eger, Tokaj, Szekszárd or Villány for instance. However, the most famous Hungarian specialty is the Tokaji Aszú, a dessert wine that Louis XV of France referred to as the ‘King of Wines’.
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The Hungarian capital is called the spa capital of the world rightly so, since plenty of the countires thermal springs and spas can be found here.
Whether it is the country’s strong folk culture, spas and baths, the cowboys of the “puszta”, the beautiful Parliament building, the spicy and hearty cuisine favouring paprika, in Hungary you are guaranteed to find authentic, impulsive and profound experiences that will turn into memories you will remember for the rest of your life.
Budapest is not just the heart of Hungary, but also the heart of 125 thermal springs which made Budapest a secret garden of baths and spas.
The Hungarian Tourism Agency launched a campaign in the middle of May, 2018 with the slogan: “Budapest, the Spice of Europe”.
Discover Hungary, our landlocked country full of water, through the eyes of National Geographic Photographer, Stephen Alvarez.
It is almost impossible to list everything that is worth doing, seeing or tasting in Hungary, and especially in the nation’s capital and largest city for hundreds of years – Budapest.
