Budapest is not exactly a city that attracts a lot of immigrants, and although you can find non-Hungarian food, this city is not exactly an exotic foodie's paradise. There are ethnic restaurants, but with rare exceptions, they are expensive and mediocre, like a lot of the Budapest restaurant scene these days. Usually, if we want to eat Japanese or Chinese food, we wait until fate finds us in Vienna or Paris. Turkish food? - wait for a trip to Berlin, or far better yet, Istanbul. But one group has been in Budapest long enough to establish their own neighborhood hangouts - the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese came in large numbers during the 1970s, when the communist government offered scholarships and aid during the Vietnam War. A lot of the Vietnamese here grew up speaking flawless Hungarian, and being sharp business folk, a lot of them left for France and Germany after 1990, when the opportunity arose. Still, today we have a few places to eat Viet food - the Four Tigers market, for one, where the Vietnamese food stands seem to have completely pushed out the Chinese food stands from our favorite stall line in the back of the market.
At Four Tigers Market Ft 600 gets you a pick and choose rice plate from one of the four Vietnamese lunch stands - and you can get cafe sua da, the iced expresso coffee that the Vietnamese adopted and improved on from their previous French Insect Overlords. And then there is our "local" Vietamese eatery - the Hanoi, located a ten minute bike ride away from us in our own sprawling district of Zuglo (Vezér út 129)It has been our private custom on Fumie's birthday to make sure she eats seafood, which is no small deal when you live in a landlocked country bounded by neighbors such as Slovakia, Romania, and Slovenia. So off we pedaled to try this place out - it has had hideous reviews, which noted long waits for food, a totally disorganized and unprofessional staff, and one report about a fight breaking out during dinner. Sounds just like my kind of place. We sat ourselves in the garden, which is possibly Budapest's only actual bamboo grove authentically strewn with bottle caps and ciggy butts, and checked out the menu.
And damn, it actually is Vietnamese! This ain't no "Kinai Bufe" serving canned sweet and sour, this is the real deal! We started safe, with pho, the national soup with rice noodles (FT900) which is perfect for a scorching hot afternoon meal as long as somebody else is laboring in a hot kitchen preparing it. Pho is pronounced "fuh" as if you were cussing somebody out but thought better of it on the first syllable.
Fumie, of course, tried the seafood pho (FT 1400) which had a hefty amount of shrimp, squid, and mussels floating in a spicy broth. Since she grew up in the seafood capital of the Universe, located on Tokyo Bay, she was satisfied with the huge shrimp and squid which disappeared down her gullet in a wink. These creatures did not die in vain. They died in Fumie's soup, or on their way there, at least.
Next she turned to the side dishes: shrimp wrapped in rice paper filled with rice noodles. These were not the best in the world... but then, we realized that there did not seem to be any aged Vietnamese grandmas tottering around the place, which is usually the sign of a great Viet kitchen. No, these were just teenagers, it seemed, and they had lived in Budapest so long that they didn't feel their rolls had to compete with some street stall selling amazingly delicious shrimp rolls on every corner as they might in Saigon, or Paris, or New York... or even Hollywood, Florida.
The same could be said for the fried nem. Ordering these in Hungary is always a linguistic treat - nem means "spring roll" in Vietnamese, but it also means "no" in Hungarian. I lived with a dozen Vietnamese during college, so I usually call them, simply, nem. I want some nem! Vietnamese nem, in fact, played a central role in the long ago drama that led to the happy abandonment of my adolescent state of of virginity, but that is another story and not one for the printed page.
These nem were perfect, but the dipping sauce was a bit uninspired - nothing more than a bowl of fish sauce - and a bottle of Sriracha sauce. All in all a fine meal, but not outstanding. One of these days we will go back and order from the non-soup menu. When I have a wad of cash. This is a modest restaurant but not a cheap one. Most of the seafood items are justifiably pricy, but this seems to a be a place where the local Vietnamese community goes when it needs to celebrate and not count pennies in public. And who knows... maybe we were just unlucky - perhaps somedays there are some Vietamese grannies in the kitchen.
I love trolling youtube for interesting videos of traditional music posted by people from all over the world. Some of the stuff posted there are documents of traditions that have totally bypassed official or commercial distribution, stuff that used to be unavailable to anybody except the intrepid field ethnomusicologist with a tape recorder. I just found a couple of youtube videos of the great Maramures fiddler Ion lui Grigore Covaci, also known locally as “Paganini” who lives in the village of Saliste in the northern Romanian region of Maramures.
Ionu is about 75 years old now, and is mainly known as one of the best fiddlers of the devilishly tricky Maramures style of fiddle. Ion also comes from a long dynasty of musicians of Gypsy origin (he would never use the term “Rom” to describe his background) from the town of Viseu, and during his youth he heard local Maramures Jewish music played by his own family as well as by members of the Shloimovitch family band in nearby Rozavlea - not the particularly famed dwarf Jewish theater and band of the related Ovitch family. I've written about them and the Shloimovich band on this blog, and during that trip I had the pleasure of going on a crazed road trip with Ion to Hoteni to visit Ion Pop, the leading personality in traditional Maramures music today and a musician who works with Ionu quite a lot. Ion Pop included a set of Maramures Jewish tunes on a Cd produced by the excellent Ethnophonie label in Romania and available via the equally excellent Passion Music in Britian. I have also visited with Ion quite a lot over the years, and he is quite the character, as you can see in these videos. In this first one, he seems to be on some kind of television cavalcade of Romanian traditional musicians, and is asked to play a set of the Jewish tunes he heard as a youth.In the second video, Ionu starts out by playing the classical peasant doina, the story of a shepherd who loses his sheep, which has become something of a set piece among Maramures fiddlers. He also seems totally nonplussed by having his fiddle go completely out of tune on live TV, something that most musicians would never live down. The Jewish part begins at around two minutes into the clip - there is a part where Ionu imitates the sound of the Yiddish speaking badkhen or Marsalinka directing the wedding in between tunes.Ion never actually played with the Shloiovich band, but neighboring fiddlers from Ieud and Dragomiresti did. I spent days hanging with them mainly to get a sense not only of the repertoire used in the region, but also the style in which Jewish musicians preferred to perform it. The typical Maramures accompanying instrument since the first world war has been a retuned guitar known as the zongura, and today it is used as background for almost all Maramures music. Most of the older generation of Maramures professional musicians specified that Jewish musicians never used the guitar, preferring all string bands, so what we are hearing is a modern recreation of the repertoire, without any obsessive attempt to present a historical model.Here is another clip made with Ionu outside of his home in Saliste in which you get a sense of what a complete entertainer he is - he loves swinging his fiddle above his head. He's a professional village primas... this is how you make a living. On this final video, Ionu begins the set of Jewish tunes about 1:30 into the clip. These are all tunes we use in my band – we recorded them during the sessions for our last CD Traktorist, but the set proved too long to fit on the CD and so it sits on my shelf waiting for me to release another CD in the future.
It is deep into a Budapest July, and given the economic macro-situation in our household, we have been staying at home most of the summer. We are in the middle of a heat wave, broken almost every three days by a cold front which brings on tornado style winds and hail storms. As I mentioned, this is good for very little but... wild mushrooms. Down at the Bosznyak Market this week it the mushroom sellers were pushing chanterelles, called róka gomba "fox mushrooms" in Hungarian. As I said a few posts back, all wild mushrooms sold have to be checked and certified by a resident mushroom expert at each market. Most of my mushroom picking friends learned their expertise by sitting with these folks at the height of mushroom season and watching how they identify the different types of wild mushrooms. Gombavizsgálat means "mushroom examinations." You can trust these folks. They mean business. Nobody gets sick.
Chanterelle mushrooms are firm and meaty. These cost about FT 500 for 30 dekas, enough for two of us to really make a meal from them. If you were to order these in a New York restaurant you would be explaining things to your banker next week. We also got some Oyster mushrooms, which are cultivated in Hungary and don't have to go through the examination process. I used to see these in the USA in gourmet supermarkets - in Hungary they are almost as cheap and common as regular mushrooms. I usually eat these in soup.
Most Hungarians simply saute the mushrooms and serve them over meat as a sauce, make omlettes out of them, or stew them with paprika and onions for gomba pörkölt. I like the natural flavor of the mushrooms to shine through, and the best mushroom dishes I have ever had were in Italy... the market ladies always ask me "and how do you prepare them?"
Pretty simple: saute them in olive oil with crushed garlic and a pinch of salt. Serve with pasta. But I like to have a bit of meat with my pasta... usually we hit a small butcher market in the back of the market that serves a largely Gypsy clientele, mainly because it is cheap and serves less than fancy cuts of meat. Which can mean different things in Hungary - I buy beef cheeks here for stew at a ridiculously low price, since nobody knows what to do with beef cheeks. Those babies are US$20 a pound in New York at wholesale prices for restaurants. But since it is scorching hot these days we do most of our cooking out on our ancient Turkish electric grill on our porch, and duck hearts were on sale. Marinated in lemon juice, olive oil, garlic and black pepper they grilled up very fast. Voila! Grilled duck hearts with chanterelle mushrooms on capellini.
Just taking some time out of our heavy summer schedule to wish my sister a happy birthday! She's (_fill in blanks__) years old, and my, my, she has always loved a party! For those of you who don't know, my sister is a highly regarded medical research doctor in the States. If you or somebody you love has ever taken a medicine and not died or gotten horribly sick from it from it, you can thank her. But before opting for the curing of the human body, she used to work on the human soul. Pam was one of the best classical pianists in New York during her time - she won the New York City competition several years running while at New York's High School of Performing Arts and went on from there to Julliard. In this picture, you can see the seeds of that talent taking root. Always an avid performer, I have dozens of photos of my sister in various ballet costumes, but I am too much of a gentleman to display them here. Here's one of my favorites, taken with my Mother sometime in the middle of the twentieth century. Happy birthday sis!
The weather this spring and summer in Hungary has been a series of warm, sunny weeks followed by cold stormy weeks, one after the other. The positive take on this is that this makes for the perfect conditions of a great porcini mushroom year. Porcinis (vargánya in Magyar, cèpe in French or boletus edulis in Latin) are usually available each summer but the prices are usually too high to buy them often. A month ago porcinis were available in the markets at FT 3500 (US$17) a kilo. Last week they dropped to FT 1500 ($7) a kilo. We picked up a bit less than a half kilo – a bit extravagant, but worth every forint.Wild mushrooms are often for sale in the open markets. Each market has an official examiner who double checks all mushrooms being sold to make sure no poisonous varieties are mixed in, then the mushrooms are certified and the certificate is displayed by each pile of mushrooms. At this time of year a lot of chanterelles are on sale. Some of my friends are mushroom hunters and during the spring and early summer they often unload shopping bags full of “chicken of the woods” on me – it’s a flat tree fungus with a hefty texture that you can treat almost as meat. Porcini (cepes, vargánya in Magyar) puffballs comprise the group of four mushrooms known for safety there are few poisonous mushrooms that resemble them.
Hungarians will often bread and fry the larger porcinis, but I prefer to let the delicate fresh shrooms flavor a pasta sauce: simply olive oil in which garlic has been sautéed and removed, black pepper, and sliced shrooms. Risotto is also a good way to get a lot of mileage out of pricy porcinis, but since we have an obscenely large stiock of dried mushrooms on hand in the pantry, we eat mushroom risotto quite often - for fresh porcini, tossing them in with with fresh tagliatelle is the answer.As for the crazy weather… we had a huge sudden storm last week with hail balls the size of cherries flying horizontally at sidewalk level. I grabbed my camera to catch it and as I was filming one of my basil plants was actually blown off the terrace – it landed in the garden below and survived. I only noticed it when Fumie came home and told me the basil was missing. I was too caught up in filming the storm to see the basil take wing - it takes its leap into oblivion at around 30 seconds in.
June is the month when Budapest breaks out in in a spate of chronic festival events. Just about every weekend means some kind of crowded street fair featuring music, greasy street food, and in some cases, horsies. We had the National Horse Race in Hősök tere a few weeks ago, a celebration of Hungarian national symbolism without the Hungarian right wing nationalist embolism that usually accompanies such events.
It rained during the races, as it has for nearly every day this month, but at least the horses seemed to be having a good time. The Athe Sam Roma festival was going on at the Gödör Klub downtown. Each night there was a kicking lineup of great Roma bands, both amateur and pro, and for a few days the Gypsy community in Budapest could relax and enjoy themselves in the spring evening air downtown. Although this year has seen an upswing in anti-Roma sentiment fanned by Hungarian right wing extremists, the atmostphere at the Gödör was festive and open, with Roma, Hungarians, and the stray tourist all dancing the night away.
Last weekend my band had a gig at the castle in Tata, about an hour’s drive east of Budapest. This is one aspect of playing in Europe that I never get tired of: half of my gigs are in amazing spaces such as castles and villas. I once played in the villa belonging to Enrico Caruso in Florence, Italy and got to use his bathroom for our dressing room. A life of fiddling in dive bars around New England and now I play in twelfth century castles... can't argue with progress!Tata is actually about four small towns linked together without any real central downtown area, located on a lake. It's quite nice, if you have a car, and quite spread out if you don't. If anything in Hungary can be said to evoke Los Angeles freeway culture, it is Tata. The lake even has a fountain spouting in the middle of it, just in case too much unadulterated nature is not your cup of tea.The usual festival food was on offer… I am not actually a fan of this stuff, mainly because the local Mom and Pop food vendors have been edged out of the festival business by larger established catering firms, and the food is always the same and always rather mediocre and expensive. Why is it that eating at a festival in Hungary means hunks of the greasiest food possible? Ham knuckles, sausage, pork kebabs, bacon sautés…After we finished the gig the next band up was the amazing Django style Gypsy swing of Frankie Lató’s Jazz Band. Frankie Lató is one of the most creative young Gypsy violinists working in Hungary now, with a fluency in Jazz violin that puts him head and shoulders above the mob of great fiddlers this country produces. But like most musician Gypsies, Frankie loves greasy, old fashioned Hungarian kolbász.
If there is anything that can be called "Gypsy cuisine" it is a love of fat meat and paprika grease. Given that most Roma spent the last few centuries in dire poverty, meat was often uncommon, and the available cuts were often the cheapest. And the fattiest. I remember being served a pork roast by Gypsy cimbalom player Toni Árpád and his wife in Transylvania a few years ago. They offered me a platter and knowing the Romani aesthetic, I forked up the fattiest, greasiest piece on the plate, to which Mrs. Toni offered a gravy of a pint or so of lard drippings from the pan. "That's my boy" whooped Uncle Árpi "It makes you strong!" Maybe it is time to try the Atkins' Diet again? Or maybe just dance more.
Finding decent food is easy in Budapest as long as you follow the Hungarian system: eat Hungarian food. The big open markets are at their best at this time of year, but within certain bounds - if you want to make Hungarian food, you'll find everything you could ever wish for, providing that all you ever wish for is kohlrabi and carrots. If you want to make just about anything else, buy a plane ticket.
We do our shopping at open markets several times a week. It sure beats shopping at Costco - my meat is never prewrapped in plastic, my kraut is scooped out of a barrel, and there are bugs crawling on my radishes. I know my butchers and they know me, I have my favorite farmers' stands, the mushroom lady sees me and knows I'm the Weird Guy Who Puts Oyster Mushrooms in Soup. The best market people are performers on their own stage, ten hours a day, six days a week, masters of marketing in their unique way. The tomatos below were on thirty percent off sale for five minutes in each hour... the sign says "Please Don't Squeeze Them. They are not Bagpipes."
Usually we hit Bosnyák ter Market in our nabe in Zugló, which is one of the cheapest markets in town and still one of the most traditional, which is to say beat up, dusty, and low priced. Some days, however, we head to the tonier Lehel tér market, where good Csopak wine comes in two liter plastic bottles for FT 880 (four US $.) To get to the Lehel tér market, we use a secret route that begins behind a hidden "village" located next to the MAV railway tracks behind Mexikói ut.
There seems to be a lost village of retired MAV workers back here, complete with houses that seem to have been plucked out of some dusty country village, along a dirt road complete with flower beds. There isn't any evidence of the expected hobo settlement, and although the crossing for traffic is almost always down, most pedestrians and bikers simply look both ways and walk across the rail crossing.If the station master starts yelling at you you know there may be a train coming.
This leads to the Rákosrendező train station, where there is an old fashioned bar and snack stand for the railyard workers, before crossing over to northern Pest and a ten minute bike ride to Lehel tér. Although still in use for local trains, the main purpose of this station seems to be to provide shooting locations for bad avante garde films.
Lehel tér has one of the last remaining old fashioned self service cafeterias left in Budapest, a relict of the old communist era chowhouses that used to be found on every main square and which have now pretty well all replaced with McDonald's. You grab a tray and choose from an array of food sauced in parika and sour cream. Old time budget meals that have almost disappeared from restaurant menus such as spaghetti covered in poppy seeds and sugar are always available here, but the smart choices are good old fashioned Hungarian stews: pörkölt. This is a classic circa 1982 worker's lunch.
This is probably what most foreigners think of as Hungarian "goulash", but in fact it is what we call marha pörkölt - beef stew. Essenially, beef stewed in paprika sauce over the tiny peal pasta called tarhonya. Tarhonya is an old way of dealing with dried pasta: the term comes from Old Turkish - tarhana - and today you can find a similar pasta in any Istanbul supermarket, and tarhana soup is considered the national dish of the Volga Tatars. Hungarians pan fry the tarhonya first and then add the cooking water, which makes the tiny pasta come out in varying shades of yellow and brown with a nice nutty flavor .
In Hungarian cooking each meat stew is considered to have its own side dish: beef stew gets tarhonya, while pork stew is served with the little egg and flour dumplings called galushka. I've actually been lectured by waiters when trying to get a beef stew served with galushka. It just don't work that way in Hungary. Sourkraut stuffed yellow peppers make this a complete summer meal. After a nice, light summer meal of a plate of stew and tarhonya - yes, this would be considered a light summer meal here - what better could you wish for than some nice cakes. And voila! - the pastry stand is located just outside the cafeteria, close enough that you can grab a dessert and bring it back inside to finish off your meal.
Let's bring our Bosnian extravaganza to a close with some musings on burek, one of my favorite street foods. Back when this blog was beginning we were spending a couple of months in Istanbul, and our breakfasts often meant heading down to the local börek baker and ordering tea and a slice of the flakey pastry filled with meat known throughout the former Turkoid world as börek. In the Balkans, the word morphs with various spellings into burek. And Sarajevo has some very good burek.
The winner of the burek competition was a tiny place on a side street in Bascarsija simply advertising "Sac Burek." Sac is turkish for a charcoal grilling process in which a large metal pan is filled with coals and hung above the burek to bake it from above - kind of a dutch oven idea but adapted from the older Anatolian tradition of baking layered flatbreads without a real oven.
The burek pastry is called yufka, just as in Turkey, and is made by preparing a simple dough of flour and water and then soaking balls of the dough in oil for a few hours. The resulting dough is shiney with shortening and, beaten out, becomes elastic. Rolled and tossed until it is a thin and translucent parachute, the yufka is filled with meat (classic burek) cheese, potato, or spinach and cheese and rolled into a coil and baked. At the Sacburekdzinica it was served with a side of thick clotted cream. Breakfast doesn't get better than this for one Euro.
The best part of staying in the Bascasija district was the convenient access one had to amazing, high quality cheap eats. Wake up, drag self down to street, start drinking coffees and fresh orange juices and grab a slice of the world's best burek for next to nothing. Practice speaking a barbaric mixture of agrammatical South Slav mixed with Turkish with the owner, usually on the topic of Turkish football. "Turkiye? Dobro. Besiktas? Mnogo dobro. Moje team. Cok iyi! Super!" Continue throughout the day.
We can get burek now in Budapest - although it can't hold a candle to burek in the Balkans. there used to be a Kosovo Serb refugee in town who made burek for a select string of late night bars, but he's resettled himself in Serbia now. There is a Voivodina Croatian Bunyevac family that runs a couple of bakeries (on Kiraly utca and another on the Korut) that makes a decent northern style burek, and there is also a Serb bakery in Ujlipotvaros that is making burek. They, however, microwave their burek before serving it, which pretty much destoys them as it destroys any bread or baked product. Burek is best enjoyed fresh... and perhaps it is even better enjoyed by the seaside in Istanbul... Karakoy... mmmm...We managed to get some shopping in for the twelve hour trip home from Sarajevo at the central market, the Markhale, located in the center of the downtown. I picked up strings of dried okra for making stews, Fumie stocked up on fruits and greens to take back to Budapest, and I lucked out at one stand selling home brewed rakia for 5 Bosnian Marks a bottle (US$ 3)
The Markale was the site of one of the final atrocities of the Siege of Sarajevo.The first happened on February 5, 1994 when 68 people were killed and 144 more were wounded when a Serb mortar was shot into the Market from the hills above Sarajevo. The second occurred on August 28, 1995 when a mortar shell killed 37 people and wounded another 90. This latter attack was the stated reason for NATO air strikes against the Bosnian Serb forces that would eventually lead to the Dayton Peace Accords and the end of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Today the market is thriving, and a wall in the rear of the market honors those killed during the bombings. The bombs were indiscriminate: Muslim Bosniak names rest beside names of obvious Serb and Croat origin as well. The monument was one of the more moving that we sawe in Sarajevo - life goes on, yet no one forgets the victims. On our way out the next morning, we passed destroyed villages in the northern part of Bosnia where the present day invisible dividing line separates the Muslim Croat Federation of Bosnia from the still isolated Republika Srpska.
The Bosnian Serb Republic may well be one of the most diplomatically and economically isolated parts of Europe, somewhat more legitimate than the Transdnistran Republic, but destined to remain in a legal limbo as long as war criminals such as Ratko Mladic continue to take refuge there. It is also a center for the local style of roots music, the almost amazingly unmarketable sounds of Izvorno Zvuci music. This is the local style of fiddle-and-scream music based on the narrow harmonies of the Bosnian mountain singing instead of the smooth urban music of Sarajevo sevdah. You see the crude hand carved sargija lutes - essentially primitive two course diatonic saz - for sale in a lot of Bascarsija shops.
As far as the Izvorno sound goes, check out Youtube. My buddy Ben Mandelson tried to promote an Izvorno band on Globestyle records back in the grand blossoming of the World Music movement during the late 1980s: Kalesijski Zvuci: Breakdown: The Unpronounceable Beat of Sarajevo. The album set records for least popular World Music Recording of all time. As anybody knows, I am a sucker for wild, scratchy fiddle-and-scream music of all types, but Bosnian Zvuci is just about the limit for me. I mean, no way could I actually listen to this for an entire CD. Anlother issue is that there is an awful lot of strongly nationalist Izvorno music around, and when you get to where you can understand the lyrics it can be downright uncomfortable to listen to. But that's why we have youtube!And if you need more, just surf youtube, the lazy ethnomusicologist's best friend!
Sarajevo’s distinctive little rolled cevapi are world famous - at least among former Yugos – but they are not the end of the line for cevap in Bosnia. Not by a long shot. The cevap made in Banja Luka, in the west of Bosnia, are a whole other universe of cevapoid pleasure, one that can divide cevap fans into partisan camps between two cevapdzinicas on the same street. Banja Luka is a city west of Sarajevo that wound up in the Republika Srbska after the Dayton Agreement ended armed hostilities in 1996. Today it is the de facto capitol of the Rpka. Srpska zone, and the once large muslim Bosniak population of the town was resettled into the Federation territories, many of them in Sarajevo. With them came the Banja Lucki cevap, a tight square of cevaps divided into four connected cevap and usually served with… gasp!... a hot pepper.
The square shape, which peels off into four tender mini cevapi when cut with a fork, are ever so slightly different than the Sarajevo rolled method. You usually get three (a middle sized portion) or four( super size me to veliki, baby!) squares, loaded into a somun loaf that has been dipped into a greasy broth and then toasted on the grill, which keeps the whole serving warm and juicy while you eat it. The sides – onions and kaymak cream – are topped with a couple of small hot peppers.The end result is that the cevapi stay juicier when connected into one firm meat cake than they would if already divided into little turdy taste bombs, as in Sarajevo style. The meat mix may also include some lamb, or at least younger veal. The discovery of the Banja Luka style cevapi made my life choices much harder in Sarajevo.
Will it be Zeljo’s? Or Kastel? Or the Banja Lucki place that mixes hot pepper into the meat? How can I ever decide? Luckily, I didn’t decide. I ate them all. Banja Luka cevaps were usually a little bit cheaper in price than the cevap from the better known places, and one afternoon while hanging in Mirella's cafe the bartender ran down the street, bought a big take out bag of Banja Luka cevap, and then shared them out with the whole of the bar clientele - me, Fumie, and the accordion player.When I got back to Budapest I ran into cevap grillmaster Sinise from the Jelen Bar one night hanging with some other Serbian expat friends. One mention of Sarajevo sent them into swoons of nostalgia and competing cevap nostalgia for the two styles. Even cooks from Belgrade and the Voivodina go into rapture at the mention of Bosnian cevapi.It mostly has to do with the quality of meat. Bosnia is mountainous and produces great beef and lamb. Most cevap is pure beef - slightly older than veal - and some is a mixture of lamb and beef. Serbian cevap from Leskovac uses pork in the mix, and as you get into Bulgaria you wind up with pure pork kebabche. I personally consider Bulgarian kebabche to be just beyond the pale of enjoyable cevap… perhaps because I once got food poisoning from eating a bad one in Koprivshtitsa in 2001. Which is strange since just across the border from Bulgaria you enter Turkey and suddenly the ground meat universe blossoms into the wonderful world of kofte… made of beef and lamb again. Balkan cooking is essentially a subset of Turkish cuisine, and often you will find an Ottoman era recipe tweaked into a pork dish that it isn’t possible to identify with the Turkish cuisine of the past. Greeks make souvlaki with pork, Bulgarians make kebab with pork, and guess what? It’s a political statement, not an improvement. Furthermore, pork falls apart when made into a meat patty, so you have to add binders like egg or breadcrumbs. Sticking with the beef and lamb traditions of Balkan Muslim cooking, Bosnian cevapi are some of the best of the best ground meatwads available in the universe. They are copied all over the Balkans wherever Bosnian refugees have settled, such as in Slovenia.I’m not even goung to attempt to discuss the hamburgeroid South Slav pleskavica here (which is one of the most searched items that directs readers to this blog.) Pleskavica is essentially a cevap patty that you can eat like a burger. If I am in Serbia or Croatia, yes, I will eat pleskavica. It is what I get at the Jelen and other Serb grills in Budapest. Budapest - lacking anything vaguely resembling decent beef - is a barren desert when you want a simple hamburger. In those cases you get yourself to a Serbian bar and order a pleskavica. But give me a good Balkan grill south of the border and I go for the cevap. Bosnia – keep my seat waiting. I’m pretty sure I’ll be back within the year.
Budapest is not exactly a city that attracts a lot of immigrants, and although you can find non-Hungarian food, this city is not exactly an exotic foodie's paradise. There are ethnic restaurants, but with rare exceptions, they are expensive and mediocre, like a lot of the Budapest restaurant scene these days. Usually, if we want to eat Japanese or Chinese food, we wait until fate finds us in Vienna or Paris. Turkish food? - wait for a trip to Berlin, or far better yet, Istanbul. But one group has been in Budapest long enough to establish their own neighborhood hangouts - the Vietnamese. The Vietnamese came in large numbers during the 1970s, when the communist government offered scholarships and aid during the Vietnam War. A lot of the Vietnamese here grew up speaking flawless Hungarian, and being sharp business folk, a lot of them left for France and Germany after 1990, when the opportunity arose. Still, today we have a few places to eat Viet food - the Four Tigers market, for one, where the Vietnamese food stands seem to have completely pushed out the Chinese food stands from our favorite stall line in the back of the market.
At Four Tigers Market Ft 600 gets you a pick and choose rice plate from one of the four Vietnamese lunch stands - and you can get cafe sua da, the iced expresso coffee that the Vietnamese adopted and improved on from their previous French Insect Overlords. And then there is our "local" Vietamese eatery - the Hanoi, located a ten minute bike ride away from us in our own sprawling district of Zuglo (Vezér út 129)
It has been our private custom on Fumie's birthday to make sure she eats seafood, which is no small deal when you live in a landlocked country bounded by neighbors such as Slovakia, Romania, and Slovenia. So off we pedaled to try this place out - it has had hideous reviews, which noted long waits for food, a totally disorganized and unprofessional staff, and one report about a fight breaking out during dinner. Sounds just like my kind of place. We sat ourselves in the garden, which is possibly Budapest's only actual bamboo grove authentically strewn with bottle caps and ciggy butts, and checked out the menu. 
And damn, it actually is Vietnamese! This ain't no "Kinai Bufe" serving canned sweet and sour, this is the real deal! We started safe, with pho, the national soup with rice noodles (FT900) which is perfect for a scorching hot afternoon meal as long as somebody else is laboring in a hot kitchen preparing it. Pho is pronounced "fuh" as if you were cussing somebody out but thought better of it on the first syllable. 
Fumie, of course, tried the seafood pho (FT 1400) which had a hefty amount of shrimp, squid, and mussels floating in a spicy broth. Since she grew up in the seafood capital of the Universe, located on Tokyo Bay, she was satisfied with the huge shrimp and squid which disappeared down her gullet in a wink. These creatures did not die in vain. They died in Fumie's soup, or on their way there, at least. 
Next she turned to the side dishes: shrimp wrapped in rice paper filled with rice noodles. These were not the best in the world... but then, we realized that there did not seem to be any aged Vietnamese grandmas tottering around the place, which is usually the sign of a great Viet kitchen. No, these were just teenagers, it seemed, and they had lived in Budapest so long that they didn't feel their rolls had to compete with some street stall selling amazingly delicious shrimp rolls on every corner as they might in Saigon, or Paris, or New York... or even Hollywood, Florida. 
The same could be said for the fried nem. Ordering these in Hungary is always a linguistic treat - nem means "spring roll" in Vietnamese, but it also means "no" in Hungarian. I lived with a dozen Vietnamese during college, so I usually call them, simply, nem. I want some nem! Vietnamese nem, in fact, played a central role in the long ago drama that led to the happy abandonment of my adolescent state of of virginity, but that is another story and not one for the printed page. 
These nem were perfect, but the dipping sauce was a bit uninspired - nothing more than a bowl of fish sauce - and a bottle of Sriracha sauce. All in all a fine meal, but not outstanding. One of these days we will go back and order from the non-soup menu. When I have a wad of cash. This is a modest restaurant but not a cheap one. Most of the seafood items are justifiably pricy, but this seems to a be a place where the local Vietnamese community goes when it needs to celebrate and not count pennies in public. And who knows... maybe we were just unlucky - perhaps somedays there are some Vietamese grannies in the kitchen. 
We also got some Oyster mushrooms, which are cultivated in Hungary and don't have to go through the examination process. I used to see these in the USA in gourmet supermarkets - in Hungary they are almost as cheap and common as regular mushrooms. I usually eat these in soup.
Wild mushrooms are often for sale in the open markets. Each market has an official examiner who double checks all mushrooms being sold to make sure no poisonous varieties are mixed in, then the mushrooms are certified and the certificate is displayed by each pile of mushrooms. At this time of year a lot of chanterelles are on sale. Some of my friends are mushroom hunters and during the spring and early summer they often unload shopping bags full of “chicken of the woods” on me – it’s a flat tree fungus with a hefty texture that you can treat almost as meat. Porcini (cepes, vargánya in Magyar) puffballs comprise the group of four mushrooms known for safety there are few poisonous mushrooms that resemble them. 
Hungarians will often bread and fry the larger porcinis, but I prefer to let the delicate fresh shrooms flavor a pasta sauce: simply olive oil in which garlic has been sautéed and removed, black pepper, and sliced shrooms. Risotto is also a good way to get a lot of mileage out of pricy porcinis, but since we have an obscenely large stiock of dried mushrooms on hand in the pantry, we eat mushroom risotto quite often - for fresh porcini, tossing them in with with fresh tagliatelle is the answer.
