For some reason I never noticed the Hargita Grill Café (follow link for contact details and user feedback) but with its shiny sign outside now featuring pictures of its food, it’s hard not to notice. I checked this place out before a recent trip to Transylvania, and the menu looked Transylvanian enough, but also had many not-very-Transylvanian elements to it. The restaurant itself is quite pleasant, with black and white images of Transylvania on the walls, and a few tables outside on Képiró utca. Unless you’re really paying attention, from the entrance on Képiró utca it’s easy to miss the fact that this place is actually the hotel restaurant of the Best Western Hotel Art. The single waiter working on the night we were there was nice enough, but understandably got a little busy when a few other tables arrived. So service was fine, not especially good, but not exactly bad.
There are Transylvanian soups on the menu like ciorba, erdélyi húsgombóc leves (Transylvanian meatball soup) and tárkonyos bárányragu leves (tarragon lamb soup) (Ft 660-1,000, €2.80-4.25). I tried the eggplant cream with toast (Ft 750, €3.20), which unlike most versions of this that I have had, tasted like it had mayonnaise mixed into it. “The ciorba has the right taste, same as it does in Transylvania,” said one of our group of five diners, who is actually from Transylvania. It was actually a decent soup, but I suspected that he was just trying to be nice, because the soup had just a few tiny pieces of meat floating around in it. Same deal with the tárkonyos bárányragu leves, which tasted pretty good, but just had very little meat in it. So while the appetizers were pretty neutral – again, not too good, but not too bad – the main courses didn’t even have that much going for them.
My roasted chicken breast with sheep cheese and dill galuska (Ft 1,980 Ft, €8.40) was very plain, and the flimsy, flat, skinless chicken breast was too small in comparison to the big pile of galuska that came with it. The favágó fatál (the “woodman’s plate”) billed itself as barbecued pork with garlic homemade mixed salad and fries was some unmemorable grilled pork with some pickled veggies. The menu was right about it coming on a wooden plate, however. Probably the most un-Transylvanian (and just plain weird) dish we had was the “filet mignon of pork Tokaji style” in which the pork was hidden underneath a huge pile of fruit, including banana slices. In the unlikely event that I do go back, I’d probably go for a super-traditional dish like the kolozsvári töltött kaposzta (stuffed cabbage from Kolozsvár).
The food of Transylvania is characterized by its heavy use of cornmeal and perhaps the most interesting thing on the menu was the kukorica felfújt (cornmeal soufflé), although it was not actually a soufflé at all. Rather, it was a sweet cornmeal and prune cake served with a very un-Transylvanian orange sauce. While the cake was rather good, we all agreed that it would have been much better if it were prune-less. Interestingly, my Transylvanian friend said that he had always heard of this dessert, but had never tasted it before since it’s a Transylvanian-Romanian dessert, rather than a Transylvanian-Hungarian dessert. We also tried the rétes, which was no better than the kind of strudel that you might buy in one of the franchises that operate in the underpasses and metro stations.
I was disappointed that there was no Transylvanian or Romanian wine on the menu, and that the wine list was so short in general. But in Hargita’s defense, its default mineral water is the tasty Borsec brand from Transylvania. By the end of the meal the place did start feeling like the hotel restaurant that it is. I probably should have listened to my instincts when I saw the sign outside with the pictures on it. Pictures of the food – whether on a menu or a sign – is usually a deal-breaker for me. But the worst part? Listening to Ton-Loc and Dire Straits while we ate.
So the overall conclusion of our party of five was that everything from the food to the service was neither good nor bad, just pretty neutral, and none of us said we’d return – including my Transylvanian friend, who said that he’ll just stick with his mom’s food, like any good Transylvanian would.
Actually, the Romanian version of creamed eggplant which I got from a Romanian friend, was also made with mayonaise, home made mayonaise to be precise, so it had nothing to do with convenience. Probably the way Romanians make it…
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