Time Traveling at the Baross Étterem, Breakfast Included

Food-wise there is no real good argument for the Baross Étterem (follow link for contact details and user feedback). It is your standard Hungarian fare, with no bells and whistles, unless you count those on the departing trains of Keleti Station, in which the restaurant is housed. But nobody really goes there for the inventive cuisine anyway. I am pretty sure their clientele consists of commuters, tourists, all looking for a filling meal on their way to or from their homes and destinations. But I am also sure there is a minority of romantics who see the restaurant as a kind of time-capsule to a quickly disappearing Budapest, whose old-world charm is being redeveloped to suit a leaner, faster-moving society.

Named for Gábor Baross, who, in his short life, overhauled the city’s transportation and railway system, making it safe and affordable for all, the café is apparently meant to be an everyman’s restaurant. But, in truth, there are very few places like Baross left. Its interior features huge marble columns and a ceiling so high it could double as an aviary. The waiters dress in black tie, not because it is a fancy restaurant, but because there was a time when that simple elegance was standard. (After being closed in the early ’90s, it re-opened around the turn of the new millennium.) There is a perverse, lazy comfort in biding your time at the Baross: the world rushes by around it, while the restaurant remains stuck in the past. If you really want to thumb your nose at the rat race, sit on the terrace: it puts you within yards of the train engines that arrive and depart from track six.

Naming a restaurant after Baross is somewhat ironic: In encouraging efficient connections, Baross also inadvertently depleted clientele from a network of competing railway restaurants, their town’s reputation depending on the quality of food served to commuters making their lackadaisical way to Budapest. Which brings me back to the food. Like I mentioned, there is nothing to shout about – except that one glance out the front gates of Keleti is all it takes to demonstrate the difficulty in getting a non-fast-food meal in the neighborhood. For nostalgia’s sake, I recommend something people in Baross’ time referred to as a “zone breakfast” (a kind of Hungarian brunch, pictured third from top) of a braised meat, bread and a beer, for a very old-school price of Ft 740 (€3), excluding the Ft 370 you’ll plunk down for a bottle of Soproni suds. Another nice thing about the Baross Étterem: Even though it is literally a tourist hub, the management has refrained from adopting the now-common tourist-soaking tactic of automatically adding a “tip” to the bill. This very new Budapest piece of cynicism has no place in the old, faded elegance of the Baross.

It is said that Gábor Baross was also a frequent traveler on the railway system he commanded. If nobody else, he certainly would have appreciated the Baross Étterem in all its shabby glory. Famed writer Gyula Krúdy put it best, “if only we could once more travel inexpensively in Gabor Baross’ zone, and taste that ‘zone’ pörkölt again, if we could regress a good way into the zones of that past, and from an uncertain present and still more uncertain future.” With a little imagination, and perhaps a pálinka or two, Baross Étterem allows you to do just that.

* Information on Gábor Baross was taken primarily from Krúdy’s Chronicles, edited and translated by John Batki, CEU Press, 2000.