The coffee house century: when Budapest had five hundred of them

Around 1900 Budapest had somewhere near five hundred coffee houses, and they were not places you went for coffee.

They were where you worked, read the international press, met your editor, played chess, argued about politics and — if you were a writer without a heated flat, which was most of them — spent the day. A *kávéház* would give a known regular a permanent table, hold his mail, lend him paper and ink, and let the bill run.

The whole institution came out of the same boom that built the city: a newly wealthy, newly literate capital with a huge publishing industry and nowhere else to put its intelligentsia.

The New York, and the manuscript in the Danube

The most famous story in Hungarian literary history is about a coffee house.

The New York Café opened in 1894 on the Grand Boulevard in what is now District VIII, in the ground floor of an insurance company's palace. It is the most ornate café interior in Europe by a wide margin — a two-storey hall of marble, gilt, frescoed ceilings and twisted brass — and it was, immediately, the centre of literary Budapest.

When it opened, the writer Ferenc Molnár is said to have taken the keys and thrown them into the Danube, so that it could never close.

The magazine *Nyugat* — "West" — which is the single most important publication in modern Hungarian letters, was substantially written and edited at its tables. Writers had specific tables. Waiters knew whose credit was good.

Today it is a hotel café, priced accordingly, and full of people photographing the ceiling. Go once, order the least ambitious thing on the menu, and look up: the room is genuinely extraordinary and no photograph conveys the scale of it.

The others that survive

Gerbeaud on Vörösmarty tér has been in that square since 1858 and took its present name when Emil Gerbeaud, a Swiss confectioner, took it over in 1884. It is the grand *cukrászda* — patisserie rather than literary café — and its cakes are the reference standard. It is also expensive and knows it.

Central, open since 1887, was the other great literary house and is the more comfortable of the two to actually sit in for an hour. It was closed under communism, used as a student canteen, and restored in 2000.

Ruszwurm in the Castle District is the oldest, running since 1827, and is tiny — a single Biedermeier room with about six tables. Expect to queue and expect it to be worth it.

Művész on Andrássy, across from the Opera, is the one that still feels like a working café rather than a monument.

Auguszt, a family confectioner since 1870, is where people who live here buy cake.

What killed them

Two things, in sequence.

The wars and the Holocaust removed a large part of the clientele: the literary and journalistic world of the coffee houses was substantially Jewish, and it did not survive 1944.

Then communism removed the institution itself. Private cafés were nationalised from 1949. The point of a coffee house — an unsupervised public room where people talked — was precisely what the new state did not want, and most were converted into canteens, shops or offices. The New York became a sports equipment store and then a travel agency.

By 1960 a city that had five hundred coffee houses had almost none.

What replaced it, twice

The eszpresszó. From the 1960s, a smaller, plainer, state-run espresso bar — functional, cheap, and nothing like its predecessor. A few survive with the fittings intact and are worth finding for the period feel.

Third-wave coffee. From around 2010 Budapest developed a serious speciality coffee scene, and it is genuinely good — Espresso Embassy and Fekete among the first, with roasters and small bars now across District V, VI and VII.

These are the places where the coffee is actually best. The grand houses sell a room; the third-wave bars sell a cup. Both are worth your time, for different reasons.

How to do it properly

Do not try to do the grand cafés as a circuit — three ornate rooms in one afternoon cancel each other out.

Pick one grand house and give it an hour with something to read, which is what the room was designed for. Then get your actual coffee somewhere small.

And if you want the cake rather than the ceiling, a *cukrászda* is a different institution from a *kávéház*: Auguszt or Daubner out in the Buda hills, where the queue is entirely local.

More on the full eating and drinking guide.

What to order, and what it means

The vocabulary is worth twenty seconds, because ordering "a coffee" in a grand house gets you something specific.

• Hosszú kávé — a long black, the default if you want something to sit with.
• Presszó — a short espresso.
• Tejeskávé — with milk. Kapucsínó is what you think it is.
• Dobos torta — sponge, chocolate buttercream, and a sheet of hard caramel on top, invented by József C. Dobos in 1885 and still made to the original scheme.
• Eszterházy torta — walnut and buttercream, with the marbled icing pattern that identifies it across a counter.
• Somlói galuska — sponge, walnut, chocolate sauce and whipped cream, served in a bowl and slightly chaotic.
• Rétes — strudel, and the one Hungarian pastry that is often better from a market stall than a café.

The pairing convention is coffee with cake in the afternoon, and it is treated as a proper occasion rather than a snack — an hour, sitting down, at a table you are not expected to give up.

The one thing to avoid

Do not order a *fröccs* — the wine-and-soda spritzer — in a grand coffee house and expect it to be good. That is a garden and wine-bar drink, and the place for it is Kadarka or an outdoor table in the Jewish Quarter, not a marble hall.