Budapest: No News is Fake News

Nearly an entire summer passed without a blog update, perhaps the most gaping lacunae in the history of this blog. I should hang my head in shame, but it has been a low key summer: no grand travel plans, a tight economy, and a scorching midsummer heatwave made sure we didn't stray far from Hungary. No new Balkan wars broke out, no sea of refugees flooded Hungary's borders, nobody poisoned the paprika this year. Our football squad lost a World Cup qualifier to Andorra (which had not won an international match in 13 years.) Our politicians are still abject sleazebags and thieves, and our women are beautiful. There are too many tourists and they are badly dressed and loud at night. There, that's it. That's Hungary in 2017. How many posts about the corner pastry shop can anybody bear? So, no new updates. Who the heck still blogs anymore in this age of  Facebook and Twitter? (Twitter? Abject sleazebags.) And now, just to let you know I am alive...

Note: No cakes were eaten during the maintenance of this blog...

Let me tell you about my corner pastry shop! Our "staycation" was marked by the opening of a new cafe and bakery at our local market: The Lud (The Goose) Cafe is run by the woman who runs the quality vegetable stand at the Klauzal ter  market, and it is worth the trip in itself. Apart from serving the most affordable coffee in Budapest they bake  a lot of their goods in-house, and feature old school cakes like Rigo Jancsi and Dobos Torta that you can't find in Budapest pastry shops any more without the intrusive fusion touch of some chef who has watched too may cake baking reality TV shows. At the Lud the Dobos cake has a hard caramel topping, and the Rigo is dark chocolate. It ain't retro, its real. The Lud is our new afternoon caffeine refill station.

Roast goose carcass for lunch!

A couple of doors down from the market is the legendary Kadar Etkezde, a lunch-only restaurant that specializes in the untrendy and unhealthy staples of Hungarian food that are quickly being forgotten by a generation of young chefs. Yes, it is actually hard to find good old Hungarian food in Budapest. The old "Grandma's Sunday lunch" stuff started disappearing as soon as Grandma got a microwave and a deep fat fryer for Christmas. Our little secret, which I will share with you, is that there is one day a week when the Kadar's revolving menu  features a goose pilaf using bits left over from the geese they use for their goose leg and the goose meatloaf that they serve on top of their solet, the Hungarian Jewish version of cholent that is the specialty of the house at Kadar. (I could tell you which day, but then I would have to shoot you)

Solet with goose "meatball" at Kadar

On that day the goose pilaf is absolutely the thing to order, but if you suppose that you live just across the street, and you order it to take out because you were too lazy to make lunch that day, and they know you as a local who shows up with fashionable foreign ethnomusicologist guests from time to time, they give you a whopping huge portion consisting of an half a roast goose carcass and three goose wings on pilaf. After stripping the meat off the bones I had enough for three full meals of roast goose (including the spongy and slimy black goose lungs which, I discovered, are really tasty and I want to eat them for breakfast every day.

Pide, the Turkish entry into the world Pizza competition. 

We don't really go out to eat very much besides the occasional 30 meter trek to Kadar's, but there are exceptions. Budapest has a lot of "Turkish" fast food grills but no real Turkish restaurants. There is, however, the Secret Turkish Place Where Turkish Truck Drivers Spend their Weekends While Grounded in Budapest by the European Union's No Truck Driving on Weekends Law. Also known as the Istanbul Kebab House (Orczy ut 48) it is, basically, part of a Turkish Han complex, a place where Anatolian truck drivers chill out and sip tea and play backgammon until they can legally get back on the roads on Monday morning. It is located near the Chinese market, literally inside a Lukol station, a carwash and indoor garage off of Orczy ter in the outer 8th district.

Lahmacun: better than pizza.

They do offer the doner kebab that has become so beloved of Hungarian office workers as well as some very popular Turkish lokanta dishes (chick pea and beef stew, tas kebab, sutlac) and a killer lamb shank soup. But we come here because they bake Turkish pide and lahmacun. Really good pide and lahmacun and cheap too. FT 500 a lahmacun makes it worth a bike ride, plus we go shopping at the Chinese market when we are done.

By now we are well into the autumn: the heater is on, the sweaters are unpacked, and we are already planning our seasonal migration to the marshlands of New Jersey and the Burger And Taco highlands of the Bergen County, the hand-pulled Noodlefields of Queens, and the rich Knishlands of the Bronx. Now that will be something to blog about!