The date 5 May 1993 was recorded in golden letters in the Gundel chronicles, when the restaurant hosted the British royal couple for a gala dinner. The restaurant, which is celebrating its 130th anniversary this year, is launching its ‘Celebrities’ Menus’ series with the menu served to the royal couple, and will be making these royal dishes available to everyone for ten days in July.

Gundel is famous for many things: its recipes, which have shaped Hungarian gastronomy; its world-famous guests; and the restaurant’s founder, Károly Gundel His social awareness is perhaps not widely known. He believed that everyone should be able to experience the Gundel way of life, which is why they offered dishes to suit every social class, from servants to dignitaries. As well as sumptuous feasts, the terrace used to serve salted pretzels, draught beer and boiled eggs in stew, so that the restaurant – which was the place to be – would also be accessible to those on a more modest budget.

Separate regular tables were reserved for members of various professions – including civil servants, judges and literary figures – where members of these circles were guaranteed to always find someone they knew. The further in one went, the more distinguished the guests seated at the tables became.

In Gundel’s heyday, between the two world wars, it operated much more as a vast garden restaurant, extending deep into the zoo, right up to what is now the Palm House. They were able to set up as many as a thousand chairs on the site, and on occasions such as the 1 May celebrations, they served as many as 3,000 meals. What’s more, their own 11-piece band ensured that the lavish feasts were accompanied by non-stop live music – all of this Zoltán Kőrössy, one of the owners of the operator, Eventrend Group, and the great-grandson of the restaurant’s founder, Károly Gundel he recalled at the press conference announcing the new menu range.

But over the past 130 years, visits from members of the royal and ecclesiastical families, princes, politicians and international celebrities have also graced Gundel’s guest list. These famous guests enjoyed special menus that were not available to others – until now. To mark this anniversary, the restaurant is launching its ‘Celebrities’ menu series, paying tribute to its most famous guests and memorable flavours. Firstly, in tribute to the 1993 visit to Budapest by Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the restaurant is featuring on its menu the four-course meal they enjoyed at Gundel. The choice of Gundel was particularly significant because, during the four-day visit, this was reportedly the only formal occasion on which the royal couple were not served by a court chef brought from home.

Ahead of the 32-person gala dinner hosted by Prime Minister József Antall and his wife, the kitchen prepared 10 trial menus to ensure the meal would definitely fit within the exact time limit of 1 hour and 40 minutes. The menu was handwritten, and the waiters were taught a special sequence of movements. The dishes were conceived by Kálmán Kalla, Gundel’s executive chef at the time, with the aim of incorporating the royal crown into the presentation of every dish. It was the pigeon essence that really stole the show; here, the vegetables were ultimately shaped into tiny crowns. For the main course, the sirloin, arranged in braids, was grilled on a custom-made mould, whilst the dessert was a sumptuous strawberry parfait, piled high in a giant pasta crown brought in on a trolley.

Between 8 and 17 July, anyone can sample the ‘Négykoronás’ menu at dinner time, which Viktor Moldován, Gundel’s executive chef, has reconstructed based on contemporary television news reports and photographs, and updated using modern culinary techniques. Members of the press have already had the chance to sample the menu, which consists of the following. For starters, thick slices of salmon, home-smoked to a rosy hue, were served with white asparagus and a touch of sage sauce, followed by a flavourful pigeon stock in which, alongside the soup garnish, a crown-shaped carrot was hidden. For the main course, braided veal tenderloin was served, roasted until pink, with a wild rice garnish in the centre of the meat wreath and two paper-thin crowns of roast potato. The strawberry parfait, which rounded off the meal as a dessert, also had a twist: the icy dessert looked deceptively like the real fruit, and a golden crown made of crispy pastry adorned the top.

And to make the experience even more authentic, today’s guests can also enjoy their meals from Herend tableware, using silver cutlery, just as the royal couple did in their day. The hosts also added that gin and tonic would definitely be among the welcome drinks this time. It so happened that, for the royal couple’s reception, the staff had prepared a selection of exquisite drinks, but Prince Philip suddenly said: „Gin and tonic, please”. According to reports, nobody had expected this, so Kálmán Kozma The house manager took the stairs three at a time towards the ground-floor passageway to fulfil the request.

The four-course royal menu is available with a glass of English sparkling wine for 26,600 forints (+service charge), but guests are free to choose just two courses (17,000 forints) or three courses (22,750 forints) from the menu. It was also announced at the press conference that, in keeping with the Gundel mission, 5 per cent of the proceeds from the ‘Celebrities’ menu series will be donated to the National Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.

Eventrend Group, which has been operating the restaurant since 2021, aims to fulfil this mission by paying tribute to Gundel’s golden age and traditions, whilst at the same time creating opportunities through its modernisation to ensure that, at all times of day, for every occasion and to the widest possible range of guests, so that dining here is not the privilege of just a select few. In what is perhaps Budapest’s largest restaurant garden, the venue can accommodate 500–600 guests at full capacity.

The owner, who has moved away from formal hospitality, has also returned to one of Károly Gundel’s innovations in that the restaurant is openly child-friendly, as the legendary restaurant owner had 13 children, who grew up in this garden, practically amongst the guests.