Though pretty much everything I’ve been eating in Budapest has been great, Mangalica Mennyország was a bit of a mixed bag.
It’s a good deal, at least. You can get a three course meal (soup, main, and dessert) for about 1800 Ft (just over eight bucks Canadian), so it’s hard to go wrong there.
And the soup was amazing. I’m not sure what it was — it was the daily soup — but it was seriously good. It had a really vibrant flavour that was downright irresistible. It was also absolutely crammed with tender chunks of pork, perfectly cooked potatoes, and hearty nokedli (a Hungarian variety of pasta).
It’s self serve, and you can also top it with sour cream, which is pretty much mandatory — it gives the soup an added creaminess and a little bit more zing.
Next up was the chicken paprikash, which was basically the polar opposite of the soup in the flavour department. It was ridiculously bland. At first I thought that the very vibrant soup had thrown off my taste buds — but as I ate more and more, no additional flavours revealed themselves.
The dessert wasn’t much better. I had the gesztenyepüré — sweetened chestnut puree served with cream. This should have been amazing (it was actually quite similar to the mont blanc I tried in Japan, which I loved), but the chestnut puree was way too in-your-face boozy, and the cream was some kind of unpleasant Cool Whip-esque concoction.
Location: Budapest, Akácfa u. 42-48, 1072 Hungary
How to find it: It’s inside the Klauzál Market Hall, just across from the Spar supermarket.