The spread of high-design restaurants across Budapest has in all too many cases resulted in form trumping function, meaning sleek-looking places that are better to look at than eat in, especially if you are dining on your own forint. So we’re always happy whenever we happen on a fashionable new bar or restaurant in town that seems to be run on the assumption that eating and drinking are more important than seeing and being seen. Mandarin Bár és Étterem seems to be one such place.
Set into a small and unusual two-level space in a recently-built block of flats on Ó utca in District VI, Mandarin seems to have taken its name and design cues from Italy’s popular Mandarina Duck line of handbag and accessories, whose stores have also recently popped up in Budapest. (Note that in summer the lovely little sidewalk café area usually seems to contain half the Vespa motorscooters in Hungary.) While we somehow forgot to take pictures of the interior, suffice to say that, if you like eating in restaurants that look like swanky handbag stores, you’ll like it – provided you like the color orange (there’s a lot of orange).
But it’s probably a good thing that we left out the glam shots, because that allows us to just focus on the food. We’ve been a few times, and have always liked what we’ve gotten, and recently enjoyed a lunch there that left us hoping that the Mandarin restaurant people will open as many locations as the Mandarin bag people.
What made the lunch so enjoyable were the availability of both Hungarian and international, largely Mediterranean options, the friendly, no-nonsense service, and the very reasonable prices. Up top we have the Mediterranean tapas salad, which for Ft 880 seemed like a steal, until it was compared to the two course Hungarian daily lunch special (a delicious mushroom soup and a super plate of spicy pork), for just Ft 100 more. Throw in two half-liters of genuine Bohemian draft Budweiser and the bill still came out to less than Ft 3,000 for the two of us, including all the nice sleekness we forgot to capture on film.
