Even though Budapest’s Four Tigers Chinese Market is best known as a place to get your kínai fix, there are other great tastes of the East to be had, including pho, the delicate soup found wherever Vietnamese are serving. Among the Four Tigers’s established Vietnamese food stalls, some of which also serve Saigon-style Chinese fare, this year we noticed a new stall offering pho not only in its familiar Vietnamese incarnation, but also Thai and Chinese-style.
For Ft 600 you can get a huge bowl of meaty chicken soup, luscious noodles, Asian greens, and a healthy load of coriander. Heavenly. Pho is often juiced up with a variety of hot sauces… our host offered a home-made concoction labeled “vinegar, garlic, and chilies” which really hit the spot.
My rice plate… chicken, crunchy tripe, coconut lotus shoot, greens, eggplant, and fatty pork in hot sauce. Ft 600. I passed on the usual fried sardines and batter-fried hard-boiled egg. Also available are Vietnamese sandwiches, known as bánh mì. A culinary treasures left over from the French colonial era, these are usually made with exquisite French-style baguettes, but since I was full of pho on this occasion, I didn’t try them. Maybe later this week.
I did ask for Vietnamese iced coffee – Cafe Sua Da – and was served what may be the only decent iced coffee in Budapest. Sweetened with condensed milk, served in a glass full of crushed ice, Ft 300 each, and worth every filler.
[Up Next: The Büfé of the Gods]
