The Kádár Étkezde: Good food for Bad Jews.

Beet salad at the old Kádár Étkezde: that is adequate horseradish. 

The Kádár Étkezde is back in business! Or at least something very much like it under the same roof and name. The legendary lunch-only Hungarian restaurant closed at the beginning of the Covid epidemic, and a year ago I wrote about reports that local businessman Gerendai Károly had purchased the place with the intention of reopening it without any major changes to its quirky traditions, menu, and food. It was a long wait: besides basic renovation it took a while to sort out the paperwork when it turned out that the original Kádár had been operating since 1957 without any permit. 

It kinda makes sense: located in the middle of Klauzal ter - the heart chakra of Budapest's Jewish ghetto - the Kádár essentially served old fashioned, home style Communist Hungarian Jewish food. Good food for bad Jews. The classic Jewish bean stew sólet (the Yiddish cholent) was served with a either a goose leg or a slice of smoked pork loin, Matzoh ball soup was served alongside lung stewed in cream sauce. It was the kind of nostalgia that would - in say, the 1960s - comfort a middle aged Jewish party functionary who had survived both the Holocaust and Stalinism and wanted lunch in his old neighborhood when visiting his Grandma living nearby. Kádár  served classic Hungarian food, which cloaked the Jewish identity of dishes like sólet - a  traditional sabbath meal in both Ashkenazic and Sephardic culture. And much like the Spanish Jewish cuisine of the post-1492 era it was gloriously unkosher: extra helpings of lard and pork innards help to keep the Inquisitors away.

Sólet with roast goose leg in 2025

I'll cut to the chase. The new Kádár is good. Go there. But it is new, and it is not exactly the same as the old place. They have only been open for a couple of weeks and there was an incredible PR campaign surrounding its opening, so one can expect a few bumps and growing pains, but it shows promise. The menu is pretty limited - they are just starting and running a full house every day so they will need time to finesse their repetoire. Go to their website and make reservations beforehand: it is really popular right now. The old Kádár had a regular menu and then a page of changing daily specials - the sólet was offered only on Friday and Saturdays. Today sólet is the star of the show - not surprising since few other Hungarian restaurants offer it at all. But... but.... but... it was a bit too... cheffy. A plate of quasi-semitic beans and bird will never be haut cuisine, but the old sólet presented as a savory mess of dense bean mud and goose fat begging to be shoveled into your gaping maw, offering the promise that you would never, ever be hungry again. This version, however, was a dish of identifiable beans in a sauce. It was good, but it needs to sit around long enough to... mature? Congeal? Solidify? Pre-digest?

Sólet in 2014... with horseradish beet salad

Compare the old sólet. Not an errant drop of moisture to be seen. And more than the beans, I ordered the "horseradish beet salad" for our lunch. It came... without horseradish. I saw a strand or two of horseradish in the beets, but... the old style dish was a mound of violently pungent fresh ground horseradish that ripped your nostrils and left you gasping for air. Maybe the kitchen is worried that their modern clientele can't handle the crowd-control quality of the old dish. 

Old Kádár: goose meatloaf on sólet

One of the subtexts that identified Kádár as a secret Jewish restaurant, and one that was specifically native to Klauzál tér, was it use of goose. Klauzál tér park was once an open air market, divided into two halves: the side along Nagy Diofa utca was kosher and specialized in selling goose. Goose provided the grease of Hungarian Jewish cuisine: Hungarian cuisine is based on cooking with pork lard. 

Klauzál tér in 1896.

Károly Gundel, the famed chef whose restaurant in the city park bears his name, opened his classic Hungarian cookbook with the lines: Hungarian cooking always begins with onions cooked in lard. Jews... substituted goose fat. (This was in the days before vegetable oil, and olive oil was still stuff you could only get in the south Balkans or Italy.) Over the decades, in face of social forces including assimilation, mass annihilation, and anti-Semitism, Hungarian Jews adopted more and more Hungarian eating customs, including an increasing tolerance for pork. In this neighborhood, however, Kosher butchers and restaurants maintained a strong clientele, with several establishments that catered, like the Kádár (and the Fülemüle) to an odd chimera of Hungarian and Jewish cooking: the unkosher Jewish restaurant. And thus the demand for goose meat and fat was centered into the seventh and eighth districts of Budapest. As I often did in the olden days, I ordered ludaskása, which is essentially goose bits in rice pilav. 

Kádár ludaskása today

The Kádár went through a lot of goose: it roasted the legs, ground the breast meat into its goose meatloaf, and roasted the carcasses to provide a base for stock. Ludaskása was a dense pilav-like dish of goosebits, soup veg, and rice, dense and wet, extremely filling and fatty. I did enjoy the ludaskása we had last week, but... it was something made by somebody who had imagined it as some sort of risotto - the rice light and fluffy,  a few bits of goose guts floating around in there, and worst of all... I was hungry when I finished it. This never happened with the old version. Let me illustrate why with a few photographs of a serving of the old ludaskása:

Kádár Ludaskása circa 2016

That was a small serving of ludaskása. There were about three goose wings stacked on top of a mound of rice. Fumie and I would drop into Kádár on Wednesdays and order a takeout of two servings of ludaskása to go. They would just drop a whole roast goose carcasse on top of a box of pilav and we would take it home to strip the meat off the goose bones. We would eat our pilav of ludaskása and then boil the bones for more stock, add some rice and the excess goose meat, and make an entire fresh pot of more ludaskása for the rest of the week. (As a mixed Jewish and Japanese household we can eat a lot of rice.) 

Ludaskása to go in olden times.

Yes, I know. That was then... this is now. I am not criticizing the new Kádár for not distributing whole animal carcasses to go, or for not poisoning the clients with weapons-grade horseradish. But Gerendai, the owner of the new Kádár, is also the founder of the Michelin starred Budapest Costes restaurant, and the kitchen staff are rumored to have come from that temple of fine dining. I suspect that there may be a few erudite theories of cuisine development percolating in the background of the chef's notebooks here... as we say in the backwaters of Trumpistan...it seems that perhaps they are overthinking a plate of beans. As an old time alumnus of the Kádár, we didn't go there for a culinary experience. We went there for lunch. We didn't go to the Kádár  to dine. We went to eat. 

The late Sándor Orbán, former owner and soul of the Kádár  

And I will add that I did not try either of the desserts offered, both of which were huge portions of either sweet poppy seed noodles or vanilla sauce bread pudding. They looked great, though. and the prices were actually quite fair for all of the dishes, and yes - I will return again, expecting time to iron out all the bumps and boo-boos that go with opening a new / old restaurant. Whichever direction the new Kádár goes in, it is a welcome addition to the local food scene. It is making a genuine effort to keep alive the standards and accomplishment of the former owner, the legendary  Sándor Orbán, who passed away earlier this year. Real Hungarian food has become harder and harder to find, especially in the downtown and particularly in the heavily touristic seventh district. Welcome back, Kádár Étkezde!