Requiem for a Restaurant: We went to Zsoka Mama, a lovely little family restaurant for the second time tonight. We wanted to say goodbye. It's closing on Saturday. Here's Jordan's first meal there -- chicken stew or chicken paprika. Our friends Keith and Susan will recognize it as being identical to a meal we had at a European restaurant in Brooklyn shortly before we left.
It's a little hard to believe it's our 4th Friday night in Budapest. We went to Zhoka Mama for dinner. We really like the place, but we learned the last time we were there that they close for good tomorrow night.
What is Hungarian food like? If you've been reading our blog, you can see that we've been eating Middle Eastern food, tacos and even once (gasp!) Burger King. We have also, however, sampled Hungarian food. What I would say so far based on my limited experience:
1. Hungarians really like soup. Goulash is a soup (or a stew). There are lots of other really good soups. Lots of places have a lunch special which is soup, a main course and a sweet of some kind. We've had a lot of soup here. Strangely, or perhaps not, you can't buy, it seems, canned soup in the supermarket. All I see are packaged powdered soups (like Knorr's). The other day I saw outside a butcher's shop that they had MARHA LEVES HUS for sale (BEEF SOUP MEAT). I thought that meant they had some homemade soup for sale -- but when I went in and asked for it in my best Hungarian, I was offered a hunk of raw beef with which I could make soup. I couldn't explain the misunderstanding; I hope the butcher didn't think I didn't approve of his product.
2. Sometimes what looks like soup might not be soup but Fozelek. When I was spending the day at Devin's Hungarian school, the kids were eating and I said to the teacher, "Devin really likes the soup." She looked at me funny and my first thought was, once again I've managed to screw up a simple sentence. Then she said, oh, that's not soup, its Fozelek. F is basically a pureed vegetable, just slightly less liquid than a pureed soup. One friend derides it as baby food, but adults eat it.
3.Hungarian food has a reputation for being spicy, but so far I find SOME Hungarian food is mildly spicy, some is quite bland. We've had some kind of spicy soup (red with noodles and potatoes in it), but there are also some dishes that are quite bland -- this casserole of cabbage, potatoes, a little ground beef, cheese and yogurt sauce (nice, filling, but not spicy). We have a friend here, a long term resident who says she doesn't like Hungarian food, and that Hungarians always say to her, "Oh, too spicy for you, eh?" It's hard to imagine that anyone finds Hungarian food in general too spicy.
4. There is SO MUCH Middle Eastern food here! There are felafel-gyro-shwarma places on every commercial block here. And although we randomly enter them, I don't think we've found a bad one yet. I think Kebabs are honorarily Hungarian food.
5. Dessert is a specialty here. Nice cake. Enough said.
6. Ice cream too. We hear that as the weather gets warmer, there will be more ice cream. Another reason we're eagerly awaiting spring weather.
2 comments:
hey guys! any farmer's markets? do you think there's more small-scale agriculture there, or has it also become big agro-business? My guess it would depend on where you eat or shop, but which seems to be the norm?
Thanks, Greg, for reminding me about that! There are several large markets in the city -- cavernous buildings in which there are numerous stalls from which people sell things -- mostly food.
We were talking to a woman who has been involved in environmental issues here, and so I asked her to what extent the people who sell in those markets are farmers, or are selling Hungarian produce fairly direct from the farm. She told us that some of the sellers in those markets are selling their own products.
I hope to find out more about this from another source next week.
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