What to eat in Budapest: a walker's guide to Hungarian food

Hungarian cooking stands on four things: paprika, pork, sour cream and dough. The paprika gets the fame, but the dough does the work: dumplings, noodles, pancakes, fried flatbread and strudel turn up at every meal. Here is what to order, what the names mean, and where along our routes to eat it.

Soups come first

Gulyás is named after the gulyás, the cattle herdsman of the Great Plain, and in Hungary it is a soup: beef, onion, paprika, potato and carrot, often with tiny pinched noodles (csipetke). The thick paprika stew the rest of the world calls goulash is pörkölt.

Halászlé, fisherman's soup, is bright red with paprika and made from river fish, often carp or catfish. Two styles compete: Szeged-style, with the fish strained and cooked down, and Baja-style, with whole pieces of fish and thin "matchstick" pasta in the bowl. Christmas Eve is its big day, but most traditional restaurants serve it all year.

Also worth ordering: Jókai bableves, a smoky bean soup with sausage, named after the novelist Mór Jókai; and Újházi tyúkhúsleves, a clear chicken soup with vegetables and fine noodles, the Sunday-lunch soup of Hungarian families.

Paprika stews and what goes with them

Pörkölt is meat (beef, pork, veal) slowly stewed with onion and paprika. Add sour cream and it becomes paprikás. Paprikás csirke, paprika chicken, is the classic, served with nokedli (also called galuska): small, soft egg dumplings dropped into boiling water from a board or a sieve.

The beef version to look for is marhalábszár pörkölt, beef shank stew. The shank is cut thick and cooked for hours until it falls apart, and the collagen makes the sauce rich and glossy. It's on the lunch menu of many neighbourhood places, including Kisüzem, a stop on our Ruin Bar Crawl. It is rich and juicy, and best with a side of Hungarian pickles.

By the river, the fish version is harcsapaprikás, catfish paprikás, traditionally served with túrós csusza: wide noodles tossed with tangy curd cheese (túró), sour cream and crispy bits of bacon. Túrós csusza is also eaten on its own, and it is the dish to try if you think noodles and cheese cannot surprise you.

Lecsó and the cabbage dishes

Lecsó is the Hungarian late-summer dish: sliced pale yellow peppers, ripe tomatoes and onion stewed slowly in lard or oil with a little paprika until soft and sweet. It is eaten with fresh bread, often with eggs stirred in at the end or slices of kolbász heated through it, and sometimes over rice. Every family has its own version, and it is also the base of many other dishes; in autumn you will still find it on lunch menus and in canteens.

Savanyú káposzta, sauerkraut, is the backbone of Hungarian winter cooking; at the market halls it is sold loose from barrels, next to the pickles. Its most famous use is töltött káposzta, stuffed cabbage: whole leaves of soured cabbage rolled around minced pork and rice, layered in the pot with sauerkraut and smoked meat, cooked slowly and served with a spoon of sour cream. It is the dish of Christmas and New Year, and most cooks will tell you it is even better reheated the next day. Two relatives are worth knowing: székelykáposzta, a pork stew cooked together with sauerkraut and sour cream (the story goes that it is named after a 19th-century Pest archivist called Székely, not after the Székely Land), and kolozsvári rakott káposzta, a layered bake of sauerkraut, rice, minced meat and sour cream.

A cuisine of dough

Nokedli and csusza are only the start. Káposztás tészta is square noodles fried with cabbage and black pepper (sugar is optional and hotly debated). Gombóc are dumplings: szilvás gombóc hides a whole plum inside a potato dough and is rolled in toasted breadcrumbs, cinnamon and sugar; túrógombóc is made of curd cheese. Pogácsa, small savoury scones with cheese, potato or crackling, are the snack in every bakery window.

Palacsinta are thin Hungarian pancakes, rolled around apricot jam, cocoa, sweet túró or ground walnut. Two famous versions: Gundel palacsinta, filled with walnuts and served with dark chocolate sauce, named after the restaurant on the edge of City Park at the end of our Andrássy Avenue tour; and Hortobágyi palacsinta, the savoury one, filled with minced meat and covered in paprika-cream sauce.

Lángos is deep-fried dough rubbed with garlic and topped with sour cream and grated cheese. The most famous place for it is the upper gallery of the Central Market Hall at Fővám tér (Tram 2 tour). Go early: the counters get queues. The Rákóczi tér market hall on our Grand Boulevard tour has its own small buffets, with fewer tourists.

Schnitzel, Hungarian style

Rántott hús is a breaded, fried cutlet, almost always pork or chicken in Hungary (the Viennese original is veal). It comes with rice or potatoes, very often with cucumber salad in vinegar and a spoon of sour cream. Rántott sajt, breaded fried cheese with tartar sauce, is the vegetarian classic.

Főzelék: the everyday lunch

Főzelék is a thick vegetable stew, a dish with no real English name: peas, lentils, potatoes, squash with dill (tökfőzelék) or spinach, thickened and served with a topping (feltét) such as a fried egg, a meatball or a slice of roast. Old-style lunch canteens (étkezde) are built around it. On our Jewish Quarter tour, Kádár Étkezde on Klauzál tér has served home cooking like this for decades, with simple tables and short opening hours.

Lunch at the butcher's: hurka and kolbász

The most Hungarian lunch in town is eaten standing up at a butcher's shop (hentes). Many butchers run a hot counter at midday: kolbász (paprika sausage), májas hurka (liver sausage with rice), véres hurka (blood sausage), roast pork belly and ribs. You point, they weigh, you pay by weight, and it comes on a cardboard tray with mustard, a slice of white bread and a pickle (kovászos uborka in summer, sauerkraut in winter). Eat at the high tables, return the tray. A tip from regulars: hurka crumbles when cut, so press it out of its skin with the fork.

Where to try it near our routes:

• Pinczi Hús-Hentesáru, Teréz körút, facing Nyugati station (Grand Boulevard tour, stop 4). Known for crisp roast pork belly; few seats, most people eat standing.
• Belvárosi Disznótoros, Király utca, a few minutes from Gozsdu udvar (Jewish Quarter and Ruin Bar Crawl tours). "Disznótor" is the traditional village pig-killing feast; the counter is its everyday version. Busy at lunch.
• Hentes Falatozó, Szondi utca, a short walk from Andrássy út between the Opera and Oktogon (Andrássy tour). Weekday lunches only.
• The butchers' stalls on the ground floor of the Central Market Hall (Tram 2 tour)
• Kispiac bistro on Hold utca (our eat pick at Szabadság tér) puts the same pork-heavy dishes on a sit-down menu.

A typical order: one véres hurka (blood sausage) and one sausage with ketchup and mustard, a kovászos uborka and a slice of white bread.

Cakes and sweets with a story

Dobos torte: thin sponge layers with chocolate buttercream and a hard caramel top. The confectioner József C. Dobos created it in 1884 and showed it at the 1885 National Exhibition in Budapest; the name is his own, not a drum (dob), whatever you are told.

Rétes (strudel): paper-thin pastry rolled around apple, sour cherry, poppy seed or sweet túró. Somlói galuska: sponge, vanilla cream, chocolate sauce and whipped cream in one bowl. Eszterházy torta: walnut layers with a white fondant top and a chocolate spider-web pattern. Rákóczi túrós: a curd-cheese cake with a meringue lattice and apricot jam. Flódni: the Jewish layered pastry of apple, walnut, poppy seed and plum, found in the cafés of the Jewish Quarter (Spinoza on Dob utca is our eat pick there).

Kürtőskalács, "chimney cake": dough wrapped round a spit, baked over heat and rolled in sugar, cinnamon or nuts; Molnár's on Váci utca bakes it in the window (Danube Bridges tour). Túró Rudi is the supermarket classic: sweet curd cheese in chocolate, in a red polka-dot wrapper.

For cake in grand rooms, our Highlights tour passes Café Gerbeaud on Vörösmarty tér, and the Grand Boulevard tour stops at the New York Café.

Drinks

Pálinka: fruit brandy (plum, apricot, pear, quince), drunk as a short before or after a meal. Unicum: the bitter herbal liqueur in the round black bottle, made by the Zwack family; their distillery on Soroksári út, home of the brand since 1892, has a museum (an optional extension of our Tram 2 tour, 18+). Fröccs: wine with soda water, ordered by ratio; the Hungarian summer drink. Wine: Tokaji (sweet and dry), Egri Bikavér and the reds of Villány; our wine bar post covers where to drink them.

Eating on the Ruin Bar Crawl

A few stops on our Ruin Bar Crawl serve real food: Mazel Tov on Akácfa utca, a "New Jewish Kitchen" under a glass roof; Kőleves on Kazinczy utca, one of the first restaurants in the area (2005), with a garden next door; and Kisüzem on the corner of Kis Diófa utca, a low-key neighbourhood bar with a short lunch menu.

Four things to know

• A "menü" sign at lunchtime means a set lunch (soup + main): the cheapest good meal in town on weekdays.
• Butchers and étkezde canteens are lunch places: many close by mid-afternoon and on Sundays.
• Tipping: 10–15% is usual if service is not already on the bill; look for "szervízdíj".
• Tap water is not brought automatically: ask for "csapvíz".

Walk the Grand Boulevard · Ride Tram 2 · Walk the Jewish Quarter