Here's an advisory to all low-carb, low-fat, Atkins, Weight Watchers, Slim-Fast, South Beach, and cabbage soup dieters, plus anybody else out there trying to lose weight: Beware of the Budapest Restaurant, which will surely wreak havoc on all your best intentions.
The Budapest, a little box of a place on Monroe Street in central Toledo, specializes in authentic Hungarian food. And oh, such food: mounds of chicken paprikas, stuffed cabbage and green peppers, beef goulash, breaded veal steak, pork chops, baked swiss steak, and thick, homemade chicken soup. And that's not even counting the cream pies and apple strudel.
The diet police also would take dubious note of the fixings. Every plate is loaded up with oodles of homemade dumplings (spaetzle), potatoes or rice, and a thick blanket of sauces and gravies, either paprika-sprinkled, rich brown, or sweet tomato.
Compared to the lookalike restaurants that many Toledoans find themselves eating in these days, the Budapest is a treasured throwback to the old days, without any of the usual amenities, oak-beam dcor, or big prices.
For instance, the interior consists of eight small stools at a low counter, and about 20 quaintly decorated tables along the wall near the front entrance and in a back dining room. Knick-knacks, including little dolls and miniature lighthouses, are for sale next to the cash register, which incidentally is uncomputerized: The checks, those old, lined green ones that come in pads, are filled out by hand.
As for the food, the free salad is a tiny bowl of iceberg lettuce with only two choices of dressings, French or sweet & sour. The bread is five thin slices, with packaged butter. The table coverings are plain, the napkins are paper, and the drinks, day and night, are non-alcoholic.
In regard to price, think 1959, the year the Budapest opened. The lunch fare - ignore the word "small" describing each dish -- costs between $4.25 and $4.35. A dinner, probably double the size of a lunch, will set you back around $8 - far cheaper than a week's worth of low-carb frozen entres.
To say that the Budapest cooks know their business is to vastly understate their credentials. Alice Buterbaugh and Margaret Molnar have been making the food for a whopping 41 and 42 years respectively - long enough, surely, to hold the title for longevity in a Toledo kitchen.
At a recent lunch, the chicken paprikas seemed a singular choice for judging what the sign out front advertises as "real Hungarian cooking." Unlike some local restaurants that feature the dish with boneless white breast, the dark-meat chicken at the Budapest was served on the bone, complete with tiny, admittedly annoying bits of bone, ligament, and skin. Somehow, despite the need to pick them off the tongue, they reminded me nostalgically of how people used to eat in days gone by in farmhouses and corner eateries everywhere.
Two dinners also swelled our bellies. The Hungarian beef goulash combined the requisite noodles, potatoes, and red gravy with carrots, celery, and tender chunks of beef, grease and all. And an order of swiss steak completely beat down our defenses, featuring two thick cutlets of meat swimming in the same treacherous pond of fats and carbohydrates.
Of course, the only way to top off such a blatantly sinful feast was with a $2.50 slice - nay, a foothill - of apple strudel, a Thursday-to-Saturday delight. What a way to go.
Contact Bill of Fare at fare@theblade.com
First Published June 18, 2004, 6:31 p.m.
