If someone had told me two weeks ago that I’d be enthusiastically eating that tomato-and-cabbage dish I deeply detest, I’d probably have laughed at them. If they’d added that I’d be doing all this at the Gundel restaurant, I’d take a cautious step back and make a quick getaway before that madman started ranting about his delusions.
It’s sad to say, but everyone has given up on Gundel: it’s ended up in that drawer where we toss things that were once glorious but have now lost their lustre – things we’re sorry to throw away for good, but we know will never regain their former splendour.
That was how it was with this restaurant too. No one could restore the legacy of the culinary genius Károly Gundel; after nationalisation, it could never be quite the same as before – whilst it still served its purpose for official functions, the heart, the man himself, was missing from it. Even under socialist conditions, it managed to remain at the top, but in the years following the change of regime, the generations that came after Kálmán Kalla pushed the City Park restaurant further and further down the slippery slope.
In early 2021, it was reported that the company, which successfully operates, amongst other things, the world-famous New York coffee house, Eventrend Group is taking over the kitchen – this gave cause for optimism, but unfortunately the waves of the coronavirus delayed the opening to such an extent that the doors of the main entrance, overlooking the Zoo, were only officially opened today, 8 December.
It is a relief to the eye that they have finally dared to move away from the rigid interior design of recent decades – the paintings languishing in thick gold frames, and the cold, stilted atmosphere are now a thing of the past. Don’t be alarmed; they have approached the space with astonishing subtlety; the wall mirrors play with the light, whilst the furnishings and the greenish-toned wallpaper form a beautiful bridge between the Art Deco details and the zoo’s palm house.
One of the distinctive features of restaurants today is that, for diners, the chef’s name determines whether a place is any good. This immediately raises the question: does Gundel need a celebrity chef, or is quiet professionalism and professional humility – which does not seek to outshine the legacy that the restaurant’s name embodies culturally – the better option? According to András Wolf, corporate chef at Eventrend, the answer is no – so the fact that they’ve managed to secure Viktor Moldován to head up the kitchen is a stroke of luck.
The chef, who returned home from Japan after fourteen years and a journey of 8,500 kilometres, is relatively little known outside the culinary world. He has not appeared on TV shows, nor has he taken part in international competitions; he has successfully avoided becoming a celebrity – he has simply gone about his work, with the result that the Obihiro restaurant he runs has become the highest-ranked Hungarian restaurant in the world, as recognised by Michelin. So the fact that you had to travel all the way to the northernmost island, Hokkaidō, rather than to the city centre, is a bit of a non-sequitur, isn’t it?
Moldován’s culinary expertise and astonishing precision blended with the venue’s cultural heritage: the moment the first plate was placed on the table, it became immediately clear: there was no reimagining, no dishes broken down into structures or torn apart into their constituent parts; instead, they had very cleverly taken the old menu compiled by Károly Gundel, selected a strong backbone for it, and cooked up some legendary Hungarian dishes. To perfection.
It was only now that I realised for the first time that Gundel isn’t some elitist restaurant for the establishment, where ageing politicians and former film stars are dragged in for a bit of a feast to save face, but a place that welcomes real people to enjoy proper Hungarian food. There’s breakfast, there’s coffee, desserts start at two thousand forints and main courses at four thousand – for me, the best bit of it all is that if a foreigner asks me where to go for some good Hungarian food, I can now tell them to go to Gundel. It took decades, but things have finally fallen into place.
The menu isn’t the length of a novel, but it’s packed with perfect versions of classic dishes: they’ve even put together a short selection under the nickname ‘National Eleven’, featuring dishes such as goulash, palóc soup, chicken paprikash or even the aforementioned tomato-braised cabbage – which, although I’ve hated it ever since I was in nursery, I simply have to try straight away when it’s prepared by a chef of such calibre as Viktor Moldován. I can only recommend that everyone do the same – the meatloaf was as light as a lamb’s cloud, and the tomato sauce was so rich it was as if they’d spooned sunlight into it.
In contemporary gastronomy, gravy often appears merely as a decorative element, spooned onto the bottom of the plate, but thank goodness they don’t see it that way here: beneath the chicken paprikash, I discovered a marvel whose texture, flavour and richness far surpassed anything that had previously reduced the nokedli and chicken thighs to a mere reddish heap.
Of course, there is such a thing as a Gundel pancake, and of course it bears little resemblance to what is sold under that name in most places, even though there’s no magic to it – just a sense of proportion. The same goes for the Somlói and the Rákóczi cottage cheese cake.
Just when we thought we no longer needed Gundel, and had come to regard the City Park restaurant as a star that had long since fallen from grace, all this came as a lovely surprise. We can now see just how viable, even to this day, the elegant yet not overly elitist dining experience remains – one conceived by a gastronomic genius a hundred years ago. There is a need for this conscious, perfectly thought-out cuisine: by seeing what Hungarian favourites are like without the pretensions of fine dining, even those who never set foot in this restaurant stand to gain. If this knowledge and approach do not trickle down through the professional channels into the hospitality sector, if this does not become the conscious Hungarian cuisine of the future, then the problem is greater than we had previously thought.
