Come Back and Share Your Horror Stories of Gluttonous Thursday 2010, Assuming You Make it Out Alive
So if you're a regular restaurant-goer in Hungary you probably know that tomorrow marks the 2010 installment of Torkos Csütörtök, or "Gluttonous Thursday," when éttermek around the country lop 50% of the prices of regular menu items. Unlike in previous years, this time around we decided not to give lots of advance PR to the event, for the simple reason that we're not big fans. Aside from the heightened risk of food poisoning due to the sudden increase in covers, as well as the notorious lapses in service, the stories of "missing" reservations and other seedy bait and switch maneuvers by sly restaurateurs, the whole thing just seems like a gimmick, and a disheartening reminder of how relatively overpriced most higher-end Hungarian restaurants are. Also, strictly speaking "gluttony" is about eating more, not eating the same and paying less.
Of course, there is some benefit to giving people an opportunity to dine at places they wouldn't normally go to, and some places that seem to treat the whole thing as it should be. (Baraka, for example, is even extending the promotion through the weekend.) So while tomorrow we'll probably be eating in, don't let that stop you from joining the crowds - here's the list of participating places in Budapest - and then letting everyone know via the comments section below how it all went.
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I was in Baraka and it was flawless, more than ever
The Zöld Elefant, one of our favorite restaurants (it's in Zalaapáti, a long way from Budapest, but just 10 klicks from Héviz) has given up on this after too many people used it - some even wanted to order a take-out by phone, might have been cheaper than just buying the ingredients ...
BTW its homepage includes the menu on
http://www.zoldelefant.eu/index.php?lang=en
I was in Karma and it was like an Indian sweatshop.
I would hate to have been sitting next to the door. People were queing for 20 mins at least just to get a seat even though they had made reservations.
They restaurant gave 2 hour intervals, which was not enough.
My friend ordered a dessert but they 'accidently' forgot it (they wanted us to leave as we were over our scheduled time).
However, the food was good and they were friendly enough. Luckliy we were seated at the back and not in the front section, which was very overcrowded.
we went to Verne on Vaci.
i arrived 5 mins late, the waiter told me to wait at the bar because my friends hadn't arrived and our table wasn't ready. i called my friends and they were seated 2m from where the waiter was standing.
they let us wait a long time to order, gave us "macdonalds" chips instead of the coal-baked potatoes their menu promised, forgot to bring us cutlery, forgot our salad, tried to charge us for it, and slipped a 10% "tip" in the bill.
the food was good-ish, but the portions small.
not going back there, even for half price.
"People were queing for 20 mins at least just to get a seat even though they had made reservations."
and "They wanted us to leave as we were over our scheduled time"...I wonder why they were queing?
I ate in three places; Hild Vendéglő, XO Bistro and in Cream Cafe and Restaurant. The first two were flawless and in XO Bistro they served us our food within minutes - and it tasted great.
In Cream Cafe they unfortunately charged full price for the brownie and the diet Coke i ordered, claiming that the 50% discount only was available for people who reserved a table. Full story at http://www.hungarybudapestguide.com/full-price-brownie-at-gluttonous-thursday
All in all I was very satisifed! And, XO Bistro has 50% discount today as well!
...awful, never again ...(!) :-(
Will this Budapest Guide ever be tired of sneaky-peaky marketing his "blog" on everypage that writes about Budapest?
Probably not, because his search rankings are
improved by more and more incoming links from
related sites.
It’s kind of retarded to use the comments for this purpose, isn’t it? I call it spam...
Well guys, to be honest I did not mean it as sneaky-peaky marketing, but it was in fact a story that I experienced in the restaurant.
By the way, I wrote an email to the restaurant about the event and what happened, and after doing so the restaurant manager wrote that he was sorry about what happened and invited me together with my wife for dinner to make up for the mistake!
@Minnie the minx: True, for some reason the All hungary Group website do not filter links by automatically adding the rel="nofollow" that was added to the HTML protocol by google just for this purpose. It's built in the software they use, but choose to bypass this. More on it here for techies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow
If I were them I would set up a web filter to redirect links meant to land on offending sites to somewhere they do not wish and add key word terms that would affect their google ranking, too.