Szimpla Kert

The first ruin bar, and the reason the phrase exists.

It opened in 2002 inside a condemned nineteenth-century tenement in District VII, in a quarter that had emptied out over the century and whose courtyard buildings were standing derelict a short walk from the centre. The founders furnished it with whatever could be salvaged and did not renovate the building. Two decades later that is a template copied across the district and exported to half of Europe.

What you get is a courtyard open to the sky, rooms on several floors leading off it, mismatched furniture, a Trabant with seats cut into it, bicycles hung from ceilings, projections on bare brick, and food somewhere in the middle of it.

It is now firmly a tourist destination and is priced and crowded accordingly — busier and more expensive than the smaller places two streets away. That does not make it not worth seeing; it makes it worth seeing early. Go at opening time to look at the space properly, then move on into the quarter.

Its Sunday farmers' market is the other way to see the courtyards without the crush, and is genuinely a market rather than a bar with stalls in it.