BY NATALIE BOWLUS

In print | Published February 7, 2008

Traditionally, any travel column that fails to attempt some gross generalization of the “national cuisine” and offers no worthless suggestions as to where you might go yourself to partake of would be considered appallingly deficient. I see no reason why mine should be any different. You want to find that hole-in-the-wall where the intellectuals “really” hang out? You want to know what beer will give you the legitimate Carpathian basin experience? You want goulash and paprika, baby? You got it!

Okay, not really … I did eat a lot of paprika, though! In addition to being everyone’s favorite red spice, I found out that paprika is a measly, jaundiced, mildly-flavored pepper that is widely available in grocery stores. (Incidentally, its existence in Hungary is thanks to the Turkish occupation, although “thank you” and “Turks” would never be found in the same sentence.) This wide availability, coupled with my piss-poor culinary abilities, absolute dearth of creativity when it comes to feeding myself and near-pathological worry that I won’t ever consume quite enough vegetables meant that for chez Natalie, paprika was a frequent and relished dish.

The catch is that the only meal I’m capable of preparing without having to worry that I will contract a rare and excruciating disease is raw tofu salad. As you might imagine, that gets old pretty fast. As a result, I garnered some serious first-hand experience with the restaurant scene, to the point where I’m too experienced to say exactly how often this happened, but I can say that that the forint rapidly strengthening against the dollar last fall was no coincidence.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation to me about the Budapest restaurant scene is that Hungary is the only country I have ever visited in which Americans are stereotyped as health nuts. Take that, Fast Food Nation! No small part of that perception stems from the average American’s ability to get through an entire meal without a cigarette, but much of it also comes from our (prudish) belief that maybe you shouldn’t always eat fatty food. I learned, for example, that sour cream is more than a goopy, highly-caloric condiment; it is a lifestyle.

My favorite place to get some stuffed cabbage with my sour cream was a (now defunct) hole-in-the-wall on Dob utca that we called the Grill, although not because of any cooking apparatuses they might have possessed. It must have been cooler than any of us were aware of because there was always at least one other party of foreigners there. We were initially attracted by the grimy orange walls (think old McCabe carpets) and the chaotic interior, but what kept us loyal was the melancholic Romanian waiter.

I think he must have been the son of the old couple perpetually planted at a first floor table, and he might have even cooked all the food; he was certainly in charge of what you consumed. Considering its size, the Grill had an extensive menu which was, as it happened, not in the least bit correlated with what you could actually order. Any attempts at randomly selecting a food item were met with the mournful response, “We don’t have that today.” He would never offer what they did have, though, until you had failed to guess two or three times. Going up and down the stairs seemed a Sisyphean task for him, to the point where I almost offered to make my own food in order to save him the trouble. His most famous line was, “Are you sure you want a cappuccino? It’s so hard to make. I have to brew the water … and steam the milk … Are you sure you don’t want a beer? All I have to do is pop the top.”

Unfortunately — and trust me, it kills me to say this — I find Hungarian beer mediocre at best. Brands I saw included Dreher, Borsodi and Soproni, none of which I have ever found outside of the country, for good reason. A (very drunk) professor once tried to tell me that Pilsner Urquell (allegedly the first Pilsner beer) was also Hungarian, but I think he was forgetting that Hungary and the Czech Republic haven’t been under the same jurisdiction in almost a hundred years. Speaking of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a word to the wise: I’ve heard that after the Austrians put down the Hungarian revolt in 1849 and executed 13 prominent generals they clinked beer glasses in celebration, so it was resolved not to clink glasses in Hungary for a hundred years. That time is up, but it still might be gauche; don’t embarrass yourself.

Natalie is a senior. You can reach her at nbowlus1@swarthmore.edu.

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