New Downtown Design Showcase Could Be Restaurant Hell – or Bar Heaven

As we said yesterday, genuine luxury is more than just the opposite of poverty. So whenever a super-luxurious new café or restaurant springs up – and almost everything that springs up in Budapest these days is pretty lux – we are naturally skeptical. Take, for example, the White Heaven Café & Restaurant, which opened the week before in the increasingly posh area of Pest’s Szent István tér.

As the pictures above and below indicate, White Heaven rigidly adheres to the clean lines/funky accents design paradigm that has ruled the up-market bits of the Hungarian restaurant and café business for the past few years. It is not to be confused with the “White Café” which stood, for a short while and mostly empty, on a nearby stretch of Andrássy út. Well, except for all that white, which seems even whiter given that it may be the only restaurant in Budapest today to actually employ at least one black person (that’s him above, if you couldn’t tell).

The space, which apparently took two full years to find, secure and refit, is pretty impressive, with a nice bar/café area downstairs, and a more formal dining “room” on a balcony.

This is the view down to the bar from the dining area. In the back is a big canvas by a famous painter whose name we can’t remember. Pretty swanky!

As for the food, we aren’t able to give a comprehensive report, because the menu is apparently still under development. It is also divided into three parts, for the upstairs dining room, the bar, and the café area. We’re pretty sure that we ordered from the “café” menu, which included this nice but unremarkable Italian “siesta” plate (Ft 2,500/€10).

As well as this very unremarkable turkey club sandwich (Ft 2,000)…

…and this slightly more interesting plate of fish and chips (Ft 2,000).

While we haven’t had time to sample from the “restaurant” menu, to be honest, it was more or less like you’d expect, containing lots of premium-priced international offerings of the sort you’d find at any of the city’s better Tom-George clones. One standout was a steak priced at Ft 8,000, which may be a record for a single dish in Budapest not involving a lobster.

But more interesting than what’s on the menu is the question of whether White Heaven should be a restaurant at all. As we’ve said, there is currently no shortage of spiffy eateries like this around Budapest, and it’ll take some serious luck or marketing (and probably both) to keep this place full enough to earn back what must have been a very large investment. At the same time, central Budapest has long had a woeful shortage of places one can go and have a drink and a snack in high style without that sometimes unpleasant “restaurant bar” vibe. This is why, for example, the nearby Negro Café always seems to be bursting with patrons, while so many similarly design-happy restaurants go hungry.

By chance, a friend introduced us to the owner of White Heaven the day after we visited, and we said to him what we’ll say again now. If this place doesn’t catch on as a fancy sit-down eatery, he could do a lot worse than just slimming down that menu to a few pages of café food and bar snacks, and replacing the “restaurant” in the name with “bar.” Given that he has somehow managed to get permission from the building to stay open until 2:00, it could end up being even more popular than Negro, and without all that un-deluxe slaving away in the kitchen.