Remember this item from late March about two big coffee-to-go joints about to open in central Budapest? Well, they did! Yesterday morning the Andrássy út Costa Coffee opened its doors to customers for the first time, just a week or so after the Coffeeheaven on the increasingly fashionable "Fashion Street" at Déak tér began brewing.

We stopped by Costa (above and way up top) on the way to the office and had a medium-sized latte and a triple chocolate muffin, and had a big latte and another tripla csokis at Coffeeheaven (second from top and below) after lunch. In terms of how they compared, the bigger of the two sizes of coffee offered at Coffeeheaven (Ft 680 for the latte) seemed to be roughly the same size as the medium at Costa, which is Ft 60 forints less. The muffin cost Ft 420 at Costa and Ft 390 at Coffeeheaven, which seemed to have three times as many baristas, all of whom looked like they had been drinking double espressos all day.

While the coffee and the muffins all tasted exactly the same to us - and not bad at all - both places seemed to offer much wider assortments of ass-widening pastries and stomach-flattening sandwiches than we've seen before in such to-go places in town. Both were doing good business, especially Coffeeheaven, which was packed to the gills with coffee-swilling tourists. You lose, Starbucks.