Budapest: the food edition

Budapest was a bit of a mixed bag for me, food-wise. It was probably as vegetarian-friendly as Poland and maybe slightly more so. But I still ate a lot of salads!

One of the highlights was the first night's dinner. Earlier in the day, we'd been looking for a place to eat lunch and had stopped to look at a menu. The manager was there and persuaded us to step inside to "look at the restaurant." Well, it was quite a sales pitch because inside it turned out to be amazing!

The guy told us that it used to be a monastery, and most of the inside was untouched. And they had live gypsy music that night! So we promptly made a booking and returned that night for dinner!

The gypsy band came and played for us.

Our food turned out to be... interesting. I had wanted to order the pepper stuffed with goat cheese, but the server told me it would be spicy. Michelle was brave and ordered it - it turned out to be a yellow bell pepper and pretty much the opposite of spicy. I am not sure if there was an error in translation or if they have no spice tolerance. Either way it was funny.

Our other dinner was successful too! Chris picked out the restaurant, called Menza, for our last night. We all had great food (I had porcini pasta and salad with grilled cheese) and the atmosphere was great!

We also had a celebrity sighting of the guy who stars in the Burn Notice TV show. He actually sat right behind us in a booth! We felt pretty fancy to be dining in such company!

Of course there was lots of good food besides dinners. Like a morning burek and Starbucks run...

Some giant sausages for Chris.

And this fun square, pretzel-like thing. It was softer than a pretzel but it tasted salty like one. It was nice and warm and so good!

And, of course, some drinks to close out our stay in Budapest! We went to this cool alley where all the trendy bars and restaurants seemed to be.

And, last but not least, I found this cute little coffee shop around the corner from my hotel.

It was definitely Australian-themed inside, and they even sold lamingtons!

So, to sum up, the food scene in Budapest was fun and maybe as varied as in Sydney! Most of the traditional Hungarian dishes were decidedly not vegetarian, so I'm not sure I can say that I actually got the taste of Hungary. But I enjoyed the eating adventures all the same!

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