Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
do business and debate. As the writer Dezső Kosztolányi put it in his essay Budapest,
City of Cafés: 'Az én kávéházam, az én váram' (My cafe is my castle).
Different cafes catered to different groups. Actors preferred the Pannónia, artists the
Café Japán and businessmen the Orczy, while cartoonists frequented the Lánchíd and
stockbrokers the Lloyd. But the two most important cafes in terms of the city's cultural
life were the still extant New York and Centrál.
The literary New York Café (1891) hosted virtually every Hungarian writer of note
at one time or another. Indeed, the playwright Ferenc Molnár famously threw the key
into the Danube the night the cafe opened so that it would never close. And it remained
open round the clock 365 days a year for decades. The Centrál Kávéház attracted the
same literary crowd, and two influential literary journals - Nyugat (West) and A Hét
(The Week) - were edited here.
But the depression of the 1930s, the disruption of WWII and the dreary days of
Communism conspired against grand old cafes in favour of the cheap (and seldom
cheerful) eszpresszó (coffee shop). By 1989 and the return of the Republic of Hungary
only about a dozen remained.
Nowadays, though, you're more likely to find young Budapesters drinking a beer or
a glass of wine at one of the new modern cafes. The cafe is, in fact, very much alive in
Budapest. It's just reinvented itself.
 
Search WWH ::




Custom Search