A few weeks back I was invited to a PR event thrown by the Dining Guide at the Arany Szarvas Bisztró restaurant in District I to launch their annual effort to identified Hungary’s best restaurant. Part of the festivities involved the dishing out of special ice creams submitted by nine of the 10 finalists. And when I say “special” I mean special.
Pictured above and up top are two of the flavors I tried. The first, which was engineered by Bock Bistro, featured bacon and tomato preserves. It was surprisingly good, at least compared to what you might expect. Under that is one made from sóska, from Chaetau Visz, the tony countryside inn/restaurant near Lake Balaton. It was awful, even though, as a long-time hater of sóska, I was expecting it to be pretty bad. (Validating my opinion with an appropriate grimace is Nick Robertson, the man-about-town who edits Where, one of the Dining Guide‘s sister publications.)
Interestingly, at almost the same time that all these super-luxury restaurants were doing their best to one-up each other with crazy ingredients, an “official” national ice cream competition organized by the Magyar Cukrász Iparosok Országos Ipartestülete was underway at the more humble Zila Kávéház és Krisztina Cukrászda out in District XVIII.
As in previous years, entrants in the fagylaltverseny had to “exhibit” both a standard flavor specified by the organizers (this time it was chocolate), and then had the option to show off a creation of their own.
While the Dining Guide‘s fancy fagyi face-off was dominated by entrants from the capital, two of the top three in the competition sponsored by the Cukrász Ipartestület were from the countryside. According to deluxe.hu, a creation called “French fig” by the Fittsüti Cukrászat in District IV came in third, and second place went to a Dobos cake-flavored ice cream made by Dunaföldvár’s Tóth és Fia Cukrász. Meanwhile, I was happy to see that the winner – the Csuta Cukrászda (above left), in the Fejér county village of Csákvár – is a place I know and have visited, as it is on the way to where I spend many of my summer weekends. Best of all, it won for a white chocolate-based creation flavored with plum pálinka, home-made plum jam and cinnamon that is called, appropriately enough, házias vidámság, or “home-style cheerfulness.” Take that, city-slickers.
