In the first part of today's three-course helping of steak-related stories we told the story of a long wait for a steakhouse that was supposed to open in Budapest, but didn't. Now we move on to a story of a long wait at a steakhouse that did open, but maybe shouldn't have.

The restaurant in question is the The Beer Cellar, a.k.a. "Beef Club", which sits in the basement of the Vörös Postakocsi, a traditional Hungarian restaurant that mostly seems to cater to tourists. (The receipt we got at the end of the meal was from the VP.) Despite the precedence that beer gets in the joint's double-barreled name, its website loudly proclaims "We take steak seriously!" Unfortunately, they don't seem to take service seriously.

Seriously. On a visit last Friday night, our waiter seemed to be totally overwhelmed by the task of keeping our table of eight's orders straight. After writing down seven orders, he wandered off to put them into the machine. When we chased him down to say that he had missed one, he looked at his little notebook like it was written in a foreign language he didn't understand.

Which it maybe was, because it not only took a long time - like an hour - for our food to appear, but some things never showed up, and most of what did was not what we had ordered. None of the steaks was done as requested - everything came out rare - which left some by-now-famished diners facing the decision of eating what they didn't want, or taking the risk of having their steaks come back cooked to death - or not coming back at all. About the only thing that did come as expected was the 10% "tip" automatically added to the bill.

As for the steaks themselves, they aren't terrible, or outrageously priced. The 225 gram sirloins are Ft 2,200 (€9.00), while similar-sized ribeyes are Ft 2,100 and tenderloins Ft 3,100. Side orders like fries, "spicy fries," grilled potatoes and the various sauces on offer - such as the Latin favorite Chimichurri - range from Ft 250 to Ft 700 or so. So if you can bear everything else mentioned above, it might be worth a visit to the "Beef Club." That is, assuming they don't start making people actually join some actual club; just getting the membership papers would probably take a year.