New York Café

Opened in 1894 on the ground floor of an insurance company's palace, and routinely called the most beautiful café in the world — a claim it makes no attempt whatsoever to be modest about.

Marble, gilt, frescoed ceilings, twisted columns, chandeliers, and a mezzanine where a century ago the writers of the magazine Nyugat were given ink, paper and cheap food and left alone for as long as they liked. The story that the playwright Ferenc Molnár threw the café's keys into the Danube on opening night so that it could never close is almost certainly embroidered, and is repeated because it fits.

It has had a rougher twentieth century than its current condition suggests: bombed in the war, used as a sports equipment shop under Communism, and restored to this state only in 2006.

What you are paying for is the room, and it is expensive by any Budapest standard. There is usually a queue, sometimes a long one, and the food is not the reason anybody comes. Whether that trade is worth it depends entirely on how much the room does for you — and for a lot of people, it does a great deal.

If you want the pastry without the theatre, a confectioner two streets away sells the same Dobos torte for a third of the price.