Budapest Food and Travel Guide: Goulash, Lángos and Paprika
Split by the Danube into hilly Buda and flat, busy Pest, Budapest is a grand, faded-elegant capital where thermal baths and ruin bars sit alongside some of Central Europe's most distinctive cooking. Paprika is the soul of the kitchen here, and almost everything is better for it.
What to Eat in Budapest
Forget the thick stew you may know elsewhere: authentic gulyás in Hungary is a brothy paprika soup of beef, potatoes and vegetables, served in a bowl rather than over rice. For the dense, saucy version, ask for pörkölt, a slow-cooked meat stew that comes with nokedli dumplings. Another classic is csirkepaprikás, chicken in a creamy paprika sauce.
The great street food is lángos, a plate-sized disc of deep-fried dough slathered with sour cream and grated cheese, sometimes rubbed with garlic. For something sweet, the kürtőskalács, or chimney cake, is a hollow cylinder of caramelised dough rolled in sugar, cinnamon or walnuts.
- Gulyás — paprika beef soup
- Pörkölt — rich meat stew
- Csirkepaprikás — chicken in paprika cream
- Lángos — fried dough with toppings
- Kürtőskalács — chimney cake
Where and How to Eat
Begin at the Great Market Hall (Nagyvásárcsarnok), a cavernous neo-Gothic building where ground-floor stalls sell strings of dried paprika, salami and Tokaji wine, while the upstairs counters dish out lángos and stuffed cabbage to a lunchtime crowd. Go before noon to beat the queues and the tour groups.
A buying tip: when picking up paprika to take home, look for édes (sweet) or csípős (hot) on the label, and buy the powder loose from a market vendor rather than pre-packed tins for far better value and aroma. Menus at smaller étterem (restaurants) and market counters are often written only in Hungarian, a language unrelated to its neighbours, so photographing a menu to translate it quickly saves a lot of pointing and hoping.