Budapest
It abruptly occurred to me that I haven't seen any mention here on Chowhound of Chew.hu or its Top 33 list of Budapest restaurants (generally good choices and quite varied). http://Chew.hu has food news of Budapest in the tongue-in-cheek voice of its parent http://caboodle.hu. Caboodle has vast un rated lisrtings of almost everything Budapest and is in turn a spinoff of the humor news site (in English) http://pestiside.hu. All are excellent resources for people traveling to Budapest.
I also maintain a blog about Budapest with food and restaurant ramblings at http://web.mac.com/farrago/iWeb/Welcome%20to%20Budapest/Budapest%20--%20The%20City/26BEF7E5-F707-44AF-9C32-30C3494C0AAA.html and the downloads and links section of our website at http://bvr.hu has connections to the websites of our favorite restaurants.
Budapest is a small town filled with large people. The result is that good restaurant news travels swiftly and within a year or so winds up in the guidebooks. The best places swiftly find their place into chew.hu's awareness, so there are no, or very few, big surprises. The houndish places are a bit subtler...i've posted about a great palacsinta (sweet pancakes/crepes) stand near Ikea at Ors Vezer ter; they also make wonderful langos (fried savory dough) but probably better langos can be found at the flea market at Ecseri...the best strudel (the Austrian word; in Hungarian they're retes, pronounced RAY-tesh) can be found in a tiny Retes Bolt (bolt=shop) on Lehel utca way the hell out of the center of the city and frustratingly closed during much of the summer; it's just off Robert Karoly korut, to the side of the department store Domus -- if you're serious about chowhounding, you will not miss the place (open 7am-7pm when it's open); if you're there, you're across the street from another large department store, Kika...and if you walk along the street in front of Kika, away from Domus, at the far end of the Kika building there's a small patio by its entryway and there's always a barbecue chicken truck there selling whole and partial chickens; very fresh, very good, very plain, like much of hungary over-salted to american tastes but really worth a try
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Holy macaroni! I just spent the last hour looking through your Budapest blog - it's amazing. I'm going to try to print off as much of it as possible to bring with me next week. All the information is fantastic, but of course the food bits are the best. I will only have 3 days in Budapest so it will be packed. How to eat everything?
