Having eaten Hungarian food all of my life, I don’t consider it the least bit exotic. I’m pretty parochial about what I like – Magyar cuisine is peasant food, and doesn’t stand up well to being “reformed” “fusioned” or “updated.” Hungarians – always class conscious to a fault and desperately eager to be trendy – might debate me about this, but when they go home to Mama’s for Sunday lunch it’s going to be sour cabbage and bacon grease or nothing else for them. Given the proliferation of strange, fusionoid and terrifyingly expensive restaurants that have popped up in Budapest over the last five years, there are few places where I can still find honest old fashioned Hungarian food. Without hesitation, my favorite place is the Kádár Étkezde
on Klauzal ter, in the heart of the Jewish Ghetto.
If restaurants were rated on the basis of how many uniquely oddball quirks they affect, the Kádár Étkezde would be the Peewee Herman of chow houses. It is only open for lunch. There is no real private seating – you usually share a table with a stranger. There is a seltzer bottle on each table, and you pay by the glass on the honor system. You don’t pay the waitress after your meal – you go to the guy in the white doctor’s coat standing by the door, recite what you ordered, add in how many glasses of seltzer and pieces of bread you had, and then, after paying, return to the dining room and personally slip the waitress a tip. The walls are covered with autographed photos of Hungarian celebrities of yore. It’s been like this for years. The Kádár Étkezde was one of the only private restaurants that existed during communist times, so they had to improvise the basic practicalities of capitalism, like how to pay for a meal.
The Kádár serves old fashioned Hungarian food that never shows up on upscale menus - things like spaghetti with powdered sugar and poppy seeds, or goose wings cooked into a huge plate of rice pilaf. They have the classic communist era soft drink “malna” on the menu – a glass of seltzer with raspberry syrup. The best items on the specials list disappear within an hour of opening, and you get limited top the regular menu, such as beef stew with galuska dumplings…
Due to the arcane rulings of Hungarian restaurant law, foods must be prepared and served on the day they are cooked – meaning that complex dishes that are best left to sit overnight, like most stuffed cabbage dishes, never appear on Hungarian restaurant menus at all. The Kádár gets round that by digging deep into the old fashioned regional cabbage glossary and coming up with things like “sloppy cabbage” or “Kolozsvar cabbage.” Ground pork, rice, sour cabbage, sour cream and paprika baked into an East European peasant version of lasagna.
Kádár is famous for its
solet – which is the local, specifically east Hungarian version of the Yiddish
cholent. At Kádár it is served only on Friday, and it sells out fast. Kádár
solet is served with a piece of smoked pork.
Cholent with treyf? Yes. Kádár is ostensibly a Jewish restaurant, located in the heart of the Pest Ghetto, but it accurately reflects its clientele: assimilated
Pesti zsidók who aren’t in the least bit kosher but who can’t live without easy access to goose pilaf or matzo ball soup. There is no sense of irony about it. Count how many of the celebrity photos on the wall are posing next to Tony Curtis. No irony at all.
February 18 is my Mother's birthday! Happy Birthday mom! Boldog Születésnapot, Anyukam! My mother, Margit Grosz Cohen, was born in Veszprem, Hungary in 1928. The following photographs should serve as evidence that my mother is one of the cutest chicks in the history of the world. Above, Mom around 1932 with my Aunt Etus. Below is one of my Mom's favorite pictures, in her Hungarian national dress, taken just before WWII.
My Mom's family survived WWII intact - an amazing epic story which is worth a book in itself - except that my mother became a refugee in Austria during the war. Thanks to the kindness of an Austrian doctor's widow, Frau Schmidt, my Mom was able to survive a year in Nazi Salzburg and the following years until she was able to emigrate to the US in 1948. 
After arriving in the states, Mom worked as a governess before finally settling in New York and working as a seamstress. 
My father met my mother around 1951 in New York. He was a young NY Police officer, and there was a dance set up by the Ladies Garment Workers Union with the New York Jewish Policeman's Association.... the rest is history...
Now, I ask you... is that a good looking couple or not? 
My parents married in 1952.
And pretty soon, along came my sister, Pam. 
And then, on February 18th, 1956... me. Yes, I was my mother's birthday present that year.
Still... is this not the Cutest Mom in the World?
And fulfilling all expectations, she still is! Nothing makes me happier than to have my parents with us, still healthy and happy after so many years.
Happy Birthday, Mom!
More about the CD from the 
All I can say is that it couldn’t have happened to a nicer crew of musicians than the Klezmatics, who have been slaving away for over twenty years popularizing Jewish music as a contemporary expression. They know their traditional Jewish music, they are masters of modern music, they’ve put in their sleepless nights and their road time, and they are not faking it. They deserve to come out of the shadows of the alternative scene and get the mainstream attention they really deserve. Frank London and Matt Dariau, in particular, are old buddies of mine from our days in the musical salt mines of Boston, Mass, in the 1980s. 
Having just read 
Misha was the tsymbaly (small cimbalom) player for the 
They were of great interest to me because they are one of the last bands that maintain a repertoire of Jewish tunes from Maramures and Zakarpatia, and are still called to play for the Jewish community in Munkács (Munkachevo, Ukraine.) I’ve known them for about ten years, so when 
The Técsői Banda was formed around the dynasty of the sons of Manyo Csernavec, a gypsy fiddler whose repertoire was broad and archaic, as he was the preferred musician for not only the local Hutsul Ukrainians, but also for the Jews, Romanians, and Hungarians of this multiethnic region. Manyo’s sons, Josika (accordion) Misha (tsymbaly) and Jura (drum and plonka. The plonka is a flexible reed made of negative film – originally bark or a leaf – held in the mouth between the gums and teeth and blown.) Ivan Popovic, originally from Visk, married into the Csernavec family and became the fiddler. Misha was a real gentle soul, a fine musician, and a generous host who generously shared his knowledge with us and our friends such as Tim Meyen and Pip Thompson from Australia. While the Csernavec brother could all speak Hungarian, Ivan the fiddler never learned it, so we would all speak in Romani when we were together, causing Misha to really let loose with his sense of Gypsy humor.
Misha was by no means the last player of the small cimbalom. The Hutsuls maintain one of the strongest folk traditions in Europe, and their lives are filled with ritual calendar events that demand the presence of musicians. One of the reasons the Técsői Banda are so good is that they actually earn most of their living as musicians playing for Hutsul weddings. In the western Ukraine, at least, folk musicians are still a necessary part of daily life. Below is a bit of video I made of the band last October at the Fono in Buda - as a trio (with Adam Good of Nikitov sitting in on bass) when Misha was already too ill to travel.
The cause this week is the cordon fence erected around the Parliament at Kossuth square after last 
Of course, removing police barriers isn't exactly legal, even for ex-law students turned politicos, so once again we have the beginnings of a great Hungarian Tempest-in-a-Teapot to watch for the next few weeks. Already, walls around Budapest have been spray-painted with the slogan "MUK" which stands for "We'll Start Again in March." This was a slogan used in the winter of 1957 after the 1956 Hungarian revolution. Recycling old slogans is very big here. The FIDESZ TV news channel, Hir TV referred to the incident as the "removal of the Iron Curtain."
And here we have the néni brigade, the angry aunties, complete with the Arpad-striped flag. It's not just a gaggle of irritating old women screaming at you, it's a gaggle of irritating old women holding flags that hark back to Hungary's Arrow Cross Party, the gang of hoodlums that Adolf Eichmann appointed to exterminate Hungary's Jews even as the Soviet Army was rolling across the Puszta in 1945. +goymototos.jpg)
The Arpad flag is just one of the more hateful symbols used by the Hungarian right. Above are the... "
There had to be over 600 people out at the dance house. The Almassy ter dance house is run by the bar staff, charges no entrance fee, and stays open until at least three in the morning. Gyongyi runs the show these days - she used to work over at the 
There is always at least two bands and dances going on simultaneously. In the big hall there is always some Moldavian or Gyimes Csango music. Robi Kerenyi was leading the Gyimes set when we got in. 
Two flutes accompanied by a gardon, which is essentially a wooden pig trough carved into the rough shape of a cello and strung with three heavy gut strings - tuned in unison to D - which are hit with a stick, and a smaller nylon string which is plucked. Yes, the 
Earlier this year the city inspectors decided that 
The population of the Lower East Side is mainly Hispanic and Chinese these days, but there are still a lot of reminders of the time when it was the center of New York's immigrant Jewish community. Shapiro's Incredibly Horrid Sweet Kosher wine has now moved its undrinkable product to a stall inside the nearby Essex St. Market, but their old sign is still outside.
Just around the corner is the Keh
Of course, if you still have any questions at all, the answers are still out here...
The Lower East Side is still one of the neighborhoods with the most character in Manhatten, which is rapidly becoming one huge island of homogenous glass and granite. This is where we used to come on Sundays (yes, Sundays... it was the Jewish shopping day) to get clothes and draperies when I was a kid.
Anybody need any shirts from Mr. Cauliflower and Sons? 
Just up Ludlow St. I had to say my farewell to my beloved Katz's Deli. Corned beef, juicy, on Rye. With pickles and a Root Beer. I am going to miss this place. But I'll be back...
Then up second Avenue to have a pint at McSorley's Ale House, the oldest continuing bar in New York. They've cleaned it up a bit - which is saying a lot since they used to have a tradition of never cleaning it up, and the dust hung down in stalactites from the ceiling dating from Boss Tweed's times. It was also the last bar in NY to admit women. 
Still one of the great bars of New York.A few hours of last minute shopping - Nyquil is very big in Hungary - to work off the corned beef, and I traipsed back to Chinatown for dinner. Transcendant "special beef pho" (with two different cuts of beef and tripe) from Bo Ky Vietnamese Reesaturant on Mulberry Street. $5.00.
And just as I was getting out, I noticed the sign on another eatery, and being forever a fourteen-year-old at heart... I started giggling incontrollably. This is when I really should not be near a blog, but heck...
Needless to say, once I get my maturity level down far enough, anything will set me off...