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The Guardian
5 days ago
- The Guardian
All the flavours of Budapest: a culinary tour of the Hungarian capital
Whether you're grabbing a satisfying street food snack, sampling traditional Hungarian fare or sipping a wine crafted just beyond the city reaches, one of the best ways to enjoy Budapest is through your tastebuds. The culinary scene reflects the essence of the Hungarian capital, with its combination of old-world grandeur and modern, pulsing energy. Among the art nouveau spires are opulent 19th-century coffee houses, that really have to be seen to be believed. Think high ceilings, intricate panelling, chandeliers and golden flourishes, where the literati once debated over coffee and sweet treats. Markets and traditional restaurants serve hearty Hungarian dishes, while a new generation of experimental chefs give their take on local ingredients in Michelin-starred restaurants. Budapest is just a two-and-a-half-hour flight with British Airways from London. It's the perfect excuse to plan a city break and discover the gastronomic delights of one of Europe's most magical cities. Weaving together influences from east and west, from the Ottoman empire and Austria, Hungarian cuisine is a reflection of the country's complex history. Rich, homespun dishes are the cornerstone of it all, often flavoured with Hungary's favourite spice – paprika – and featuring rich meats, seasonal vegetables, cheeses and fresh breads. Any gourmet tour of Budapest should take in the signature dish, goulash. This warming stew consists of slow-cooked beef and vegetables, with the unmistakable smokiness of sweet paprika. And there are stews for all seasons, from summery lecsó (vegetable stew made with peppers, tomatoes, onions and paprika), to creamy chicken paprikash, with sour cream stirred into the gravy – a perfect winter warmer. Don't miss halászlé, a fiery fisherman's soup served up in eateries around the Danube and Tisza river regions. Sundays are reserved for breadcrumbed and fried chicken, pork or turkey with potatoes and cucumber salad. Eating on the go is all part of the adventure in Budapest. There are plenty of markets where you can refuel, from the vast, 19th-century Great Market Hall, where stalls serve street food on the third floor, to contemporary, colourful Lehel Market. One of the best snacks to try is the humble deep-fried, cheese-topped flatbread known as lángos, slathered with sour cream and garlic. Don't miss kürtőskalács, a sweet, cylindrical chimney cake, wrapped around a spit to give it that distinctive shape and baked over an open fire. These tasty, truncated treats are coated in caramelised sugar as they cook, resulting in a golden-brown crust. For meaty snacks, try Budapest's beloved kolbász (sausage), best washed down with a local beer. You'll also find hurka (liver sausage) and véres hurka (blood sausage) at street vendors around the city, usually served with mashed potato and sauerkraut. Budapest has a strong cafe culture, with traditional coffee houses offering a glimpse into the city's glamorous past. Often adorned with dazzling frescoes and chandeliers, they form quite the backdrop for Hungarian coffee and decadent desserts. Don't leave without trying somlói galuska, a layered sponge cake or Hungarian trifle filled with chocolate sauce, walnuts, and whipped cream, or dobos torte, a multi-layered chocolate and buttercream sponge topped with caramel brittle. Prefer something a little lighter? Try rétes (strudel), a flaky pastry that comes in a variety of sweet fillings including steamed apple and sour cherry. While traditional Hungarian dishes hold a special place, Budapest's culinary scene is far from being stuck in its ways. The city is experiencing a dynamic trend towards innovative fine dining, driven by a new generation of Hungarian chefs pushing boundaries with imaginative takes on classic Hungarian gastronomy. The city is home to seven Michelin-starred restaurants – from Babel with its central European influence and wine pairing focus to the modern European Costes – and a liberal sprinkling of intimate dining venues that combine rich Hungarian flavours with the best of international cuisine. Expect sophisticated flavour combinations, artistic presentations, and contemporary twists on classic ingredients, showcasing the city's evolving style and increasingly refined palate. The perfect pairing for Hungarian cuisine is one of the country's award-winning wines, and Budapest is well stocked with vintages from vineyards just beyond the city limits. Hungary's rich winemaking tradition stretches back to Roman times, while the diverse range of indigenous grape varietals and fertile landscape make for some exceptional vintages. Try the country's most famous wine, the sweet and complex white Tokaji, or combine a rich meat dish with one of the country's full-bodied reds such as those from the Eger and Villány regions. For something a little different, Unicum is a traditional Hungarian liqueur made from more than 40 herbs and spices, blended and aged in oak casks for at least six months. From hearty traditional dishes and delicious street food to elegant fine dining and opulent cafes, Budapest offers a feast for the senses. And it's easy to reach with British Airways. Find out more and book your Budapest trip at When you fly with British Airways, you'll enjoy a generous hand-baggage allowance and best of British service. You'll also be able to book an ATOL-protected holiday package with British Airways Holidays, with the option of low deposits and flexible payments
Forbes
17-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Carlie Hoffman's One More World Like This World
One More World Like This World by Carlie Hoffman The trouble with reviewing One More World Like This World, poet Carlie Hoffman's third and most ambitious collection, is that what Sir Christopher Ricks calls 'reviewery' is in trouble. Hoffman has numerous accolades including the Discovery/Boston Review Prize, Poets & Writers Amy Award, and National Jewish Book Award, so her work garners the attention it should, but the American literati is strangely apt to describe even established poets' work in terms of simple themes, cultural politics, and gnomic non-sequiturs that border on Tarot. While this might be tempting in One More World's case – the book's central conceit involves the Eurydice myth – it misses what the book actually does. One More World is a sustained experiment in constructing a coherent personal register from grand forms – technical, sacrificial, mythological, memorial – and its accomplishment involves the translation of High Modernism into a lyric mode. Poet Carlie Hoffman Consider Eurydice. For one of Hoffman's reviewers, her use of 'mythology illuminates the timelessness of female oppression.' This reading reduces Euridice to the allegorical and therefore to the banal, quite the opposite of what Hoffman does. Such an ambitious critical veiling of the text, incidentally, is also part of why people are often convinced that they do not 'get' poetry. Most of us do not need poems to illuminate obvious truths, and so if that is all that poems are for, why do we need them at all? Another critic ties One More World's Eurydice persona to mystifying claims about 'our embodied state' and how poems 'let us transcend that embodiment' to 'underlying but essential truths.' Is 'embodiment' bad? Hoffman's book makes no such claims. What 'essential truths' ought to be made available? How, except perhaps in Eurydice's Hades, would I 'transcend' to the 'underlying?' I am unsure of what such statements mean other than that Eurydice must mean. Eurydice (played by soprano Iris Kells) is entranced by Jupiter in the form of a golden fly in the ... More Sadler's Wells production of Offenbach's opera 'Orpheus in the Underworld', London, 19th April 1962. (Photo by Erich Auerbach/) But must she? 'You must imagine Eurydice / happy,' Hoffman writes in 'A Condo for Sale Overlooking the Cemetery in Kearny, NJ.' Like a poem, happiness is under no onus to mean something other than itself. To borrow from Archibald MacLeish, it need 'but be.' An endnote identifies this line from 'A Condo' as an allusion to Camus's 'The Myth of Sisyphus,' in which Camus tells us to imagine poor Sisyphus happy. For both writers, the hinge term is 'imagine.' Camus approaches happiness as an aesthetic production through descriptions of how 'each atom of that stone, each mineral flake […]Sisyphus. Found in the collection of Museo del Prado, Madrid. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage ...) One More World is rife with references to and poems written 'after' – among others – Celan, Buber, Lermontov, Auden, Borges, Heaney, the Old Testament, and Rose Ausländer, who Hoffman has elsewhere translated. Why does this matter? 'Human beings are difficult,' the poet, Geoffrey Hill reflects. 'We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. Ane we are mysteries to ourselves.' In 'The Townspeople Contemplate Eurydice,' Hoffman compares 'the woman' – who is and is not Eurydice – to 'that Russian poet / who wished / to be buried / alive / beneath an oak tree. Unusual / desire, even for a Romantic.' The triangulation of 'the woman,' Eurydice, and 'that Russian poet' who happens to be Mikhail Lermontov is less important in terms of thematic 'timelessness' or parsing references than it is as aesthetic texture, a means for making a difficult representation of difficult selfhood possible. The Family Tree of Mikhail Lermontov Something similar might be said of One More World's Jewishness. The Los Angeles Review of Books's pairing of One More World with Marcela Sulak's The Fault is clearly on account of both authors' Jewishness, which makes LARB's simultaneous disengagement from poems like 'Myth of Icarus as a Girl, Leaving' – one of the collection's strongest – quite baffling. 'I float / in the Dead Sea,' its speaker reflects, 'and become pastoral. On Ben Yehuda Street / the siren blares.' It can be helpful to think of Hoffman's allusions functioning as pastoral elements. Lyric poems produce representations of poetic speakers and their 'worlds' hand-in-hand. 'Author's Myth,' for example, presents Moses 'Before Carmel and the suicides. After / the sea. God was a fisherman above the world. The Rabbi opened his throat / and the ocean swelled. God gave you feet and you emerged in the Synagogue.' There is no 'I' in this poem per se, but rather the preconditions for one, all the allusions and elisions of Genesis, Exodus, and the Book of Kings. The 'you' evolves from the ocean in the Rabbi's throat. Similarly, a poem's Lyric I is more or less complex – it contains greater or fewer possibilities – relative to what is 'observable' in the poem. The Dura Europos synagogue is an ancient synagogue uncovered at Dura-Europos, Syria, in 1932. The ... More last phase of construction was dated by an Aramaic inscription to 244 CE, making it one of the oldest synagogues in the world. It is unique among the many ancient synagogues that have emerged from archaeological digs as it was preserved virtually intact, and it has extensive figurative wall-paintings. These frescoes are now displayed in the National Museum of Damascus. (Photo by: Pictures From History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images) 'Shall I set my lands in order?' Eliot's speaker asks at the end of 'The Waste Land.' There is a great deal of the 'observable' in the surrounding lines from 'London Bridge is Falling Down' to the Fisher King, Dante, Pervigilium Veneris, Gerard de Nerval, Kyd's Spanish Tragedy, and The Upanishads. What is significant is less the sources per se than their role in the production of a speaking position. 'These fragments I have shored against my ruins,' Eliot's 'I' concludes. Eliot's Modernism nearly always ends at the threshold between historical intellect and lyrical self-consciousness. Similarly, I have often thought that if fire consumed all of Ezra Pound's Cantos after Canto III, we would be left with a brilliant long lyric poem, one that produced the impression of an 'I' from atoms and flakes of the past. A lady views the exhibits at the Turner Contemporary's Journeys With The Waste Land exhibition, ... More which explores TS Eliot's modernist poem and its influence on visual arts over the past century at the Turner ContemporaryÕs Sunley Gallery in Margate. (Photo by Gareth Fuller/PA Images via Getty Images) In one sense, the arc of Hoffman's book enacts the Eurydice-as-Sisyphus narrative. The three sections, 'The Garden,' 'The Replica,' and 'Then Roses,' contain several discrete instances of restaging the same poem – 'The Twenty-First Century,' 'Author's Myth,' 'Borges Sells Me the Apple, Sells Me the World' – as Sisyphean attempts. On a grander scale, the book contrasts The Garden's loss with literature's failure to produce a 'Refurbished Eden' in 'The Replica.' In One More World, places like Kearny, NJ, Brooklyn, or 'the counter of my grandparents' / luncheonette in Liberty, New York' are 'real.' Foreclosure is 'real.' Gestures toward the 'timelessness' and permanence of fictions, replicas, refurbishments, and speech are less certain. In particular, 'The Replica' stresses the contrast between the lyrical allusion-pastoralism of the 'real' world and the artificial staging of literature as purview of the literati. Hoffman's Lyric I, for example, is 'Reading Virginia Woolf in a Women in Literature Class at Bergen Community College,' 'Teaching the Persona Poem at Ramapo College,' or 'Driving Through Maspeth, NY, After Teaching an Introduction to Creative Writing Class' in 'The Replica.' Carlie Hoffman reading In Kearny, NJ – at least in One More World – Borges, Camus, and Eurydice align just because. In 'The Replica,' this must become whatever 'literature' is supposed to mean and everything becomes gradually unbecoming, like 'stuffing the soft skins / of teddy bears […] as Hades takes Persephone / deeper inside the replica of girlhood.' In the book's final poem, the speaker reflects that 'The dream was so close to the surface, it banged its head on the floorboards. / I trespass forever in the unflinching past. / The apple's a for-sale sign swaying in the breeze.' After some great departure, some exile or accomplishment of a phantasm, can we return to Kearny, New Jersey, where 'the apple's a' and the surprise of 'a for sale sign' occur as 'real' sprung poetics? Whatever is gained by transcending that embodiment? 'This winter I want a house,' the speaker of Hoffman's first poem in the collection confesses, 'where women slide from the god's photographs,' quite aware of the difference between what she wants and 'the metaphor of this winter house.' She is 'playing music when the god is renounced.' In One More World, we must imagine Eurydice giving a backward glance, wanting in winter. More on Carlie Hoffman can be found at One More World Like This World is available for purchase here.
