Back in the dark days of Hungary's recent culinary past, vegetarians who dared to dine out were often left with no other alternative than a hunk of fried cheese slathered in some variety of sauce. As a result, a lot of local gourmands who normally look away from the meat side of the menu will blanch when they see a dish primarily composed of a large piece of warmed cheese. But on Saturday night we had one such hunk-o-hot-cheese starter that was so fantastically fincsi we can barely remember what followed it.

The location was the always-pleasant back garden of venerable VI District French restaurant (and "Top 33" member) Chez Daniel, and the dish was camembert chaud aux truffes (warm camembert with truffles). What we got was probably not much more difficult to prepare than a traditional plate of rántott sajt, but viva la difference. Instead of a breaded lump of Trapista with some tartar or cranberry sauce, out came a mini-wheel of decent camembert, scored with a knife, baked in a mini clay ramekin until soft (but not runny) and topped off with a generous portion of julienned white truffles. On the side came a beautiful assortment of lightly-dressed field greens crowned by some equally fetching and delicious edible flowers. At the table our waiter added a splash of high-quality truffle oil to the cheese, then smartly backed away as we dug in.

What's interesting about this dish is not just how good it was. Aside from the camembert and the oil, which we assume were French and Italian, the other key ingredients were Hungarian. According to Daniel, the white truffles (fehér szarvasgomba, or choiromyces meandiformis in Latin) came via a typically mysterious Magyar truffle hunter. While costing a fraction of the Alpine tartufo bianco you often find shaved onto pasta in Italy - a few tens of thousands of forints a kilo, versus a few hundred - to our taste they were much sweeter (and juicier) than their more expensive cousins, and thus more suited to this dish. Meanwhile, both the greens and the flowers (sarkantyú, or "spurflower" in English) were grown at the restaurant's farm near Szeged.

The price (Ft 2,100/€7.60) is also notable given all the above, and the fact that this dish is really an entire meal disguised as a starter - not least because whatever you eat after it is going to be hard to remember.