For Proust it was the smell of freshly baked madeleines – plump little scallop shaped cakes – that triggered involuntary memories, through perceived sensory experience. For me it is parsley, dried parsley to be precise, redolent as it is of the freshly mown grass I used to dive into whilst keeping goal in inter-school football matches decades ago. Thus it was that my girlfriend had to stir me from my own reverie to lost youth in Budapest Restaurant when, in the act of devouring an exceptionally light and flavoursome liver dumpling soup, I was confronted by hundreds of little green grains of dried parsley floating on the surface of the beef consommé. The heat from the consommé intensified the farmyard pungency of the dried parsley – an ingredient I haven’t seen in a restaurant since the 1970s. The perfume was bosky and evocative, and in my daydream
I was about to save a penalty on school sports day when she kicked me on the shin and hissed, “Talk to me!”
Suitably stirred, I came crashing back to the present, and looked at the décor of the restaurant. “Why are purple walls always described as ‘aubergine’ when aubergines are black?” I asked, by way of a pacifier. She kicked me again, for no discernable reason, and the waitress took away our, licked clean, soup bowls. We had started with Hortobagyi palacsinta 2 db. The key here was that 2 db, it was un-translated on the menu but we soon discovered it was Hungarian shorthand for ‘more than enough for two’. We were each presented with a large pancake of ground chicken in a bland, cow pat coloured sauce, topped with a (welcome) sharp, soured cream. This was followed, with alarming rapidity, by a bulbous cauldron (that would easily have fed three) of the aforementioned soup. Somewhere in the region of two and a half starters each was not what we had in mind when we placed our order. Belt buckles were cautiously loosened, and we were not even a third of the way through.

The other side of the table sucked noisily on her homemade lemonade, which had a whole lemon floating in it, and blushed when the sound echoed back off the walls. “They could do with some background music in here,” she whispered, and indeed they could. The silence was deafening. I took a jog to the toilet, not out of desperation you understand, more in a vain attempt to run off some of the 10,000 calories I had already consumed. On my return the Satjos bundaban sult Haddock sat on my place mat like a valediction. It positively dared me to sit down and pick up my knife and fork. I took my belt off altogether and put it in my jacket pocket. I would not be needing it this evening.

Billy is the author of 42 articles including 'Remembrance of things past, or Proustian moments' from December's Leither

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Facing me were two large chunks of haddock in what was allegedly a ‘cheese coat’, the cheese had done a runner to be replaced by a pleasingly light tempura batter. The fish was accompanied by what the menu called ‘spicy roast potatoes’, from which the spicy and roast had also done a runner, leaving some flaccid cubes of deep fried spud in their wake. The saving grace of this dish was a mountain of green beans tossed with half a pig’s worth of smoked bacon, squeaky to the tooth, in the way that green beans should be, they were stunning, and constituted a signature dish in their own right.

By the way, I forgot to mention earlier, the matriarch of this whole operation, a redoubtable pocket battleship of Magyar blondness, welcomed us with a question of marvellous forthrightness. “Do you prefer when it is hot or cold, would you like a radiator?” (Whilst my psychoanalyst is dealing with that hot or cold question, I’ve asked my plumber to pop round and take advantage of the free radiator offer).

Meanwhile, in the all too shaky present, my girlfriend’s order of Birkagulyas tarhonya had morphed into Marhaporkolt, an act of verbal dexterity that is worth a review in its own right. Suffice to say, she ordered a lamb goulash with what the menu described as a ‘sort of’ noodle couscous and what she received was a beef stew with homemade noodles. The most defining characteristics of the rogue beef dish were tenderness and flavour, it did however lack gravy and cohesiveness, which rendered the attendant quivering tower of bland noodles, or Halusky, redundant. The violent grinding of the pepper mill on the distaff side of the table was ample evidence of the Hungarian tendency to use the sweet version of paprika at the expense of the hot one.
A Polish friend of mine told me that when Budapest Restaurant first opened he got pissed on free Palinka and sang along with a self-playing organ that churned out Polkas, it all sounded delightfully quirky. Unfortunately the organ was nowhere to be seen on the night we were there and they now have a licence. The utilitarian furniture and uniformity of its placing – not to mention the sheer size of the place – means you would not come here for an intimate, romantic evening. Which is not to say there is no warmth here, it is present in the service, which is entirely charming (and swift). I was pondering whether to describe the cooking as cuisine a la grande mere, when she of the noisy lemonade piped up with, “It’s like the food my granny used to make in her pressure cooker, she never seasoned things either” (No bad thing for your reviewer’s marginally high blood pressure).
The waitress slipped a dessert menu on to the table, pancakes with ‘two pieces of marmalade’ – I’m not even going to try typing the Hungarian, I only have eight fingers – and Tortaszelet (fancy cake), caught the eye. So too did the button on my trousers popping off and skittering loudly across the floor like a tap dancing cockroach. The waitress looked at me with infinite understanding and whisked the dessert menu away, before I did myself an injury.

My second can of Tennents lager – yes, cans of Tennents lager in a restaurant are a good thing – remained untouched. There was one final slurp from the noisesome lemonade drinker across the way and we were off, yours truly reflecting again on the fact that I hadn’t eaten like this since the
1970s – Van Dyked tomatoes anyone?

Score :
11/20

Bill for two : £34.15
including two cans of Tennents lager,
one undrunk, and a glass of homemade lemonade

Budapest Restaurant & Café
9/10 Commercial Street
Edinburgh
t. 0131 555 5604