We've got a lot of tasty stuff coming up over the next few days, but before we get to that let me quickly follow up on my recent post bemoaning the distance you have to travel from central Budapest to get your Vietnamese fix with a similar gripe about Chinese.

Local fans of high-end kínai probably already know that Wang Qiang Budapest's undisputed master of Chinese cookery, opened a new restaurant late last year. The opening of the plainly-named Wang Étterem on a side street in District XIV came just a year and some after the festive launch of the Wang Mester Konyhája in District IX. While the spiffy website for the two restaurants is lanzhou.hu, it seems that Wang has no formal relationship with either Lanzhou (VIII) or Új Lanzhou (II). Which is a damn shame, because getting from the middle of town to either of Wang's palaces sometimes feels like a trek to Ürümqi.

I exaggerate of course, but still, it's a bit of a hike from downtown to either of Wang's joints, with the newer of the two being a good 15 minute walk from the nearest metro station. Perhaps because of this I've only been there once, and arrived so late that everyone in my party was already eating.

And then I got so busy playing catch-up I forgot to figure out and write down what everything we had was.

I understand that most of the dishes on the menu are Xinjiang (Uyghur) style, with the remainder Hunan/Beijing/Sichuan-style.

Either way, it was all very tasty, if not necessarily for folks who are spooked by unusual dishes.

Again, I'm sure there are good reasons for proprietors of restaurants to avoid tying themselves to a pricey lease somewhere closer to the river, especially if their primary clients (in Wang's case, definitely Chinese) don't live downtown, and the offering is a bit out of the ordinary. Still, for someone who used to live a couple of blocks from New York's Chinatown, it's like Chinese water torture to have stuff like this just far enough away that I'm unlikely to go very often - or, even worse, to try to make it at home.