Budapest Cafe on 2nd Avenue

It's easy to bemoan all the great stuff that's vanishing from NYC so that's why it was so wonderful, this weekend, to discover the Budapest Cafe up on 2nd Avenue and 85th Street.

The family had one of the best meals we've had in long time. 

This is the kind of down-home, hearty-fair joint that I love. Great big portions of comfort food -- in this case, Hungarian comfort food -- that'll make you happy. The wife and kids had some savoury crepes which you can get with cheese or ham and cheese. She also enjoyed a delicious bowl of cucumber soup that I sampled and loved. Yours truly consumed a huge serving of veal goulash, absolutely delicious and very filling, and it was served with something I'd never had before -- Hungarian pasta, something called Nokedli. These are handmade noodles that are somewhat gnocchi-like but squiggly in appearance and don't have any kind of sauce on them (you mix it with the goulash, in case you were wondering). If and when I go back, however, I'll make sure to get the Chicken Paprikash which appears to be a customer favorite (everyone else there was eating it)

However, the real star at this place is the pastries. The restaurant is basically a bakery with a few tables in the back. The baked goods were amazing -- we had the massive, dense chocolate mouse, the delicious cookies and my personal favorite, strudel. Strudel is one of the hardest pastries to make, the dough and filling are complex and arduous to create, and most places give you substandard, non-flaky strudel. Not this place. This is hard core, multi-layered dough, fresh apple strudel with whip cream that puts you in pasty nirvana. My wife took me there precisely because she knows of my long love for strudel and she was, as usual, right!

So this is a great place to go, the kind of place that still makes NYC the greatest city in the world.