It’s a prematurely warm spring afternoon in Budapest and I’m basking in the rooftop hot tub of the Rudas, one of the city’s impressive thermal spas, where people have been bathing for centuries. Sunlight has cracked open the leaden skies. My fellow bathers—a carefree group of locals and tourists—are oblivious to the city’s workday bustle. Soft, sulfurous water from the Gellért Hill behind us—so named after a Christian martyr who was rolled down its steep cliff in a barrel a thousand years ago—is nourishing our bodies with healing minerals.
A stone’s throw below, past the tram tracks, is the meandering Danube—far from blue, but confidently wide. We are in Buda, and on the opposite side of the river, framed by the arches of three majestic suspension bridges, unfolds a postcard panorama of Pest, the Hungarian capital’s flatter, more urbane side. The pastel promenade of façades stretches to a vanishing point. In the distance looms the Gothic cupola of the parliament, a fairy-tale concoction trumpeting the pride of a nation that once commanded more than four times its current size.
I haven’t lived here in 30 years and each time I return the view still moves me.
The Rudas, established in 1550, reemerged not long ago from a renovation that has turned it into a latter-day temple of wellness, tricked out with every conceivable high-tech amenity involving steam and water. As such, it is a fitting place to contemplate the essential character of Budapest, which can be summed up in one word: hedonism. In every age, it seems, and no matter what hardships were visited upon them, the people of this picturesque yet resilient metropolis have found their way back to pleasure.
Soaking in the soothing waters, I’m reminded of earlier episodes of thrill-seeking here, some of which I’m old enough to have experienced. In the chaotic 1990s, after the collapse of socialism, dancers frolicked in the half-drained swimming pool on the ground floor at wild-and-wet Cinetrip parties; Hollywood classics flickered on screens while few limits to modesty were observed (let’s gloss over what went on in the changing rooms). During the slow, dull years of Soviet rule, the steam rooms of the Rudas filled up with big-bellied men who sweat away the hours in conversation. And the timeline of indulgence stretches back further: to the Turks, who built a splendid, still-functioning octagonal hammam on this site in the 16th century; and the Romans, who decamped nearby, lured in part by the thermal springs, two millennia ago.
In so many ways, Budapest owes its very existence to the timeless human urge to pamper, connect, and indulge. From the uninhibited caloric excess of the food, to the dripping ornamentation of the city’s buildings, to the myriad cafés and patisseries that fill up daily with friends and lovers savoring the sweet art of doing nothing, the pursuit of pleasure for its own sake constitutes the inextinguishable genetic code of this city.
Hedonism as Survival Strategy
How, you may ask, did Hungarians become virtuosos of the good life? My own view is that when your past is as grim as theirs, you hang on to pleasure as if your life depended on it. Hungarian history is a woebegone list of occupations, dashed hopes, and missed opportunities. The country’s alarming drift back to authoritarianism and right-wing extremism is just the latest episode. So gloomy have things been over the centuries that the Hungarian national anthem has the unique distinction of warning about the doom of the nation it extols. The country has long claimed top ranking in the international suicide statistics. It was perhaps in response to this melancholy state of affairs that Hungarians refined the techniques of making themselves feel better. It’s hedonism as survival strategy.
My maternal grandparents’ story is a case in point. They enjoyed life zestfully, even when much of what was great about it was snatched from them.
In 1921, when my grandmother, Mici, and my grandfather, Sándor, were married, they took an apartment in the recently opened Hotel St. Gellért for a whole year—a luxury underwritten by a sizable inheritance. A short walk from the Rudas along the Danube embankment, the Gellért has lost some of its shine since then, but it remains an architectural wonder, its cone-shaped towers and white stone façade shimmering like an apparition from Casablanca, or maybe Hollywood. In Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 5 art film, Ursula Andress can be seen swanning about in the mosaic pools of its opulent thermal bath complex.
As they awaited the completion of their Italian-style villa, atop the Hill of the Roses (the Bel Air of Buda), Mici, a trained musician, practiced her piano, while Sándor, a multi-lingual lawyer, botanist, former cavalry officer, and businessman with degrees from Budapest, Oxford, and Leipzig, wrote a food menu for a whole year: Not one breakfast, lunch, or dinner combination was to be repeated. This was the same man who got into a disagreement with Károly Gundel—chef proprietor of Budapest’s finest restaurant, originator of the flambéed chocolate-walnut crepe (Gundel Palacsinta) that remains a classic of the Hungarian culinary repertoire and a favorite of every Hungarian child—about the correct side dish demanded by a certain French recipe. A bet was made. A copy of Larousse Gastronomique was ordered up from Paris. My grandfather was proven right.
The life of Mici and Sándor in the 1930s was a dreamy montage of pleasures and explorations. They regularly took their chauffeured Chrysler limousine on overnight jaunts to Vienna to enjoy an opera and a stay at the Hotel Sacher. Years later, I found their leather steamer trunks covered with stickers from hotels from Monte Carlo to Biarritz. One of my favorite photos of my grandfather shows him at the race track wearing a black tuxedo and top hat, his trademark monocle on his nose, buttery leather gloves clasped in his hand.
Around this time, my grandmother started a food journal. In it she recorded their most memorable meals, which became increasingly grand affairs as the years went on, calling for all manner of special ingredients and cooks. A dinner from 1933, for example, called for “crab soup (23 crabs) … goose liver with a mushroom ragout … roast duck with potatoes … Malakoff and Congo cake with frozen chocolate … espresso with cream … fresh strawberry ice cream ... chocolate mice … marzipan potatoes … four bottles Riesling, three bottles select Riesling, three bottles Champagne.” On another occasion, lilac sugar flowers were rushed in from France to decorate a cake that demanded precisely such adornments.
Then things got darker. Much darker. The villa took a bomb in the war and was looted. Sándor and his older daughter, my aunt Marika, barely survived the Nazi camps. Their younger daughter, my future mother Klára, and Mici got through the war pretending to be distant relatives.
When the Communists took charge, they soon deported the family for the second time, to a small village southeast of Budapest, as payback for being members of the “exploiting class.” My mother, blocked from going to college, worked on rice paddies and cotton fields—part of a Stalinist experiment in food self-sustainability. Their neighbors in the house included the well-to-do peasant owners— “kulaks” punished by having to share their rooms with the urban bourgeoisie—along with a general from Hungary’s German-allied army and the colorful Madame Frida, proprietress of Maison Frida, one of Budapest’s pre-war luxury brothels—soon to become a character in a novel that my grandfather wrote on a secret typewriter (“enemies of the people” were forbidden from owning typewriters), which he would read aloud in installments to his wife and daughter on weekends.
By the 1950s, between the Nazis and the Communists, the family had been stripped of almost all of its assets—the jewelry, the carpets, the paintings, the stocks, the insurance policies, the vineyard, the rebuilt villa, the apartment buildings—not to mention Sándor’s lucrative job as chief executive of a trading company. Yet through much of this harrowing ordeal, Mici faithfully kept up her food journal. An entry from the year 1950 recorded a humble repast of “cold tea, cold meat, liver, and fruit.”
Despite their trying experience—or perhaps, because of it—the love of food and conversation remained the family’s anchor. To this day, the strongest memories of my youth are of sitting around the Sunday lunch table, draped with white linen and set with bone china and antique silver, with the extended family talking about books and classical music concerts while savoring the delicious cakes—a different flavor and shape each week—that Mici lovingly baked.
People Knew How to Live
In any event, what’s exciting about Budapest today is seeing the time-tested charms of the city showing up in fresh guises as a new generation carries forward the city’s penchant for hedonism. Despite its myriad problems, “Budapest still feels the thrill of being liberated,” notes András Török, a literary editor and author of an erudite guide to the city. “It’s like a big spring that has been pushed down for a long time, and now released. It has infinite energies, and newer and newer generations of young people, who believe in the future of this place.”
Even in the endless years of Soviet occupation, people knew how to live here. A fragile ecosystem of joie de vivre persisted, like a fossil preserved in amber. The icons of Budapest’s former grandeur—the Art Nouveau Zoo, the gilded cafés on the broad boulevards, the elegant pools, museums, theaters, and music halls—were hiding in plain sight. The ice cream and pastries were no less excessive than they are now. And with little pop culture to distract them—no TV on Mondays until 1989!—Hungarians looked for satisfaction elsewhere. Music, reading, cooking, the outdoors, the fine arts, and of course, romance were pursued with anachronistic fervor, some of which still lingers.
One of the most striking signs of Budapest’s revival since the Cold War has been the metamorphosis of the former Jewish ghetto, in the heart of Pest. The area has turned from the grim, dark, and lifeless maze of streets into a pulsing destination for the EasyJet and stag-party crowds. Before World War II, Budapest had Europe’s most integrated Jewish population. The enormous Dohány Street Synagogue, the largest on the continent, was a monument to their status and influence. When the Nazi curfews began, in 1944, the walls between the courtyards of the apartment buildings in the area were opened up. A half-century later, enterprising club and restaurant owners reclaimed these atmospheric spaces, including the spacious arcades of the Gozsdu Udvar, Budapest’s answer to Berlin’s Hackesche Höfe. The thing to do, I’ve been told, if you’re a young Brit or Italian looking for adventure, is to fire up the Tinder as you head in from Ferihegy airport, and beeline it here.
All around town, majestic old buildings are springing back to life. The Academy of Music—where gilded Egyptian-goddesses prop up the balconies, their curious cutout brassieres channeling Jean-Paul Gaultier—has been rekindled from the ashen pile of my memories into the resplendent white Art Nouveau masterpiece it was meant to be. On a recent visit, my wife and I stayed at the Gresham Palace, formerly one of Budapest’s most storied apartment buildings, now a Four Seasons hotel, where the glass ceiling of the interior arcade gleams with tiles designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. In my youth, it was a decrepit ruin that served as a backdrop for music videos.
Budapest’s once dour and bullet-pocked streets are bustling with young people who linger in cafés and bars, smoking, talking, sipping espressos. A leisurely walk through Pest can trace the arteries of this sybaritic landscape: from Falk Miksa Street, where art galleries and antique shops have sprouted up; along Kazinczy Street, slicing through the Ghetto, now lively with open air romkocsma (“ruin dives”); over to Liszt Ferenc Square, lined with restaurants and their terraces; down Andrássy Avenue, Budapest’s Champs-Élysées, where luxury brands like Louis Vuitton have elbowed in among the neoclassical palaces; through Deák Ferenc Square and its skateboarders and backpackers; along Váci Street to the resplendent Great Market Hall, its stalls brimming with meat and spices; and on to the ever-changing array of eateries in Ráday Street. Along the way, every flavor of hip, cool, global, and trendy can be savored.
Everything Is the Same, Only Different
Much of this new intensity is devoted to food, and especially, sweets. Few things matter more to Hungarians. “My grandmother used to say—probably because she and her family lost everything to the communists—that only the food you eat is really yours,” says Erika Deák, proprietor of a well-established contemporary art gallery. The cuisine—fair warning—is not for the faint of heart. Its strengths are revealed to those who are willing to venture beyond contemporary nutritional guidelines. Locals are firmly convinced it's the best in the world. Truthfully, things have come a long way since my American wife suffered through our first joint visit, in the mid-1990s. Back then, vegetarian options were limited to fried cheese along with peas and carrots drowned in mayo.
Lately, there has been something of a revolution in cooking, as a new generation of chefs is blending classic dishes with the latest gastro-trends. You can now find decent Chinese, Mexican, Indian, even sushi, and yes, vegetarian. But the food has always been eclectic here. This is Europe’s melting pot. Everyone came through Hungary at some point—the Romans, the Slavs, the Mongols, the Ottomans, the Germans, the Russians, and nowadays, a United Nations of tourists—leaving behind their genetic fingerprints and their cultural codes. Look around and you will see blonds, brunettes, redheads; dark and pale, short and tall. Same goes for the Hungarian palate. Crescent shaped morning pastries remind of the Turks. Sweets laden with poppy seed telegraph Jewish heritage. An Austrian schnitzel or a Bavarian sausage is never far away. The perfectly brewed coffee points to Milan.
A recent trip to my hometown ended with dinner at one of the city’s best restaurants, Babel Budapest. It is tucked into a thimble of a street downtown, under what had been the Faculty of Liberal Arts as I was growing up, now returned to its pre-war function as a theological seminary. The logo of the trendy spot was designed by Sam Havadtoy, a Hungarian-American artist and designer who was Yoko Ono’s companion when he was living in New York. The kitchen served up a succession of reimagined classics, from a brazenly modern take on spaetzle to a veal stew that had come a very long way from its humble origins. All were accompanied by the much-improved wines now produced in Szekszárd and Tokaj, poured in custom glasses from the crystal workshops of Ajka.
In so many ways, Budapest has once again rediscovered its taste for the good life. As I sat in the impeccably designed dining room, looking out at the Danube, I was reminded again of the tension between change and continuity here. The square outside has been spruced up. The sculpture on which I climbed as a child has been moved. Everything is the same, only different. It has ever been thus, here on the Central European fault line between East and West. Yet some things never change. Boats bob gently on the river. Couples stroll arm in arm by the window. Over in Buda, the lights on the Castle flicker on. It is time for dessert.
Where to Eat, Stay, and Play in Budapest
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