Rosenstein

Since I have a blog now, I figure I should incorporate some restaurant reviews and extort free meals out of restaurant owners with my savage keyboard. Please tell all your friends to visit Secrets of the Cabbage and boost my hit count enough pegs to help feed me throughout the ongoing global economic collapse. Also to this end, I would be most grateful if someone would leave convincing comments such as "we visited Rosenstein at your suggestion and you were absolutely bang on about the chauteaubriand. Best 28,000 forints I ever spent!"

Móni's great-uncle Sanyi was visiting from Israel for cousin Szilvi's exuberant wedding last weekend where we all had to dress up as Star Wars characters, and in honor of Rosh Hashanah very kindly invited us out to Rosenstein, an upscale but un-frou-frou place in the 8th district (a dark and spookily atmospheric section of Budapest that reminds me of certain parts of Philadelphia. It might also, like Philadelphia, be a giant portal to the spirit world) that serves out homey non-kosher Jewish-Hungarian classics, some of which have made the crossover into the mainstream Magyar kitchen in various forms, and other Hungarian favorites with TLC and a creative twist.

The thing is we don't eat out so much in Budapest, especially when it comes to Hungarian food, unless we have visitors in town. The reasons for this are 1) with enough time we can usually cook it better and cheaper at home 2) if we do eat out, it's more likely for exotic fare we can't make ourselves such as sushi or pizza or Balkan grills or suchlike  3) we travel a lot both in Hungary and abroad, so restaurant budgets are saved for such excursions, and 4) the troposphere of the Budapest restaurant scene is kind of sketchy: often overpriced and pretentious, and with so many one-off addlepated tourists wandering the inner districts ready to pay big money for someone to glop something with paprika and sour cream into their soup bowls, you have to know where you're going to assure even a regular supper with uncut corners.

Rosenstein is a member of this short list of go-to places to take visitors to: it's a family restaurant, with the father heading up the kitchen, son doing the managing: more than a few notches above the regular standard fare vendéglő but without losing sight of the mitteleuropäische Gemütlichkeit and earnest attention to happiness that warms the spirit. So there's an air of nostalgia, but a crisp air, not a cloying one in a town that can knock you over with cloying nostalgia when it wants to.

This week, because of Rosh Hashanah, the menu is more Jewish than usual. It starts with the traditional apple-honey concoction to assure the sweetness of Year 5772. Then a mixed shared starter plate of Jewish egg (fancy egg salad), goose liver and goose cracklings. Observant Jews in Hungary traditionally ate a lot of geese as their go-to special-occasion meat, whereas Christians would more typically eat pork, and although relatively few of the former keep kosher today, as a country we still serve up plenty of goose for everybody. Hungary today produces a good portion of the world's goose liver (I'm more or less of the view that it doesn't really constitute animal cruelty if done propertly by gentle loving peasant hands, ah, maybe) and it's a good bit cheaper here than France. If you buy canned French foie gras chances are it was produced here and the French added just enough Gallic magic (such as the can) to in good faith stamp "Produit de France" on it and double the price.

For mains, every ordered something different from the expansive menu. Irénke, Móni's 93-year-old grandmother got this giant Jackson Pollack / Piet Mondrian construction of cutlets and potatoes which she dug into with a healthy appetite, with leftovers for the next day.

Sólet

Retired Sólet chef extraordinaire

I was the only one to order off the weekly holiday specials and went with the Sólet (Cholent), a bean casserole, originally Polish and prepared in different ways around the region, and traditionally prepared for the Sabbath (hearty fare that you could nosh on all day without lighting any forbidden flames). This was one of Grandma Irénke's signature dishes before she retired from the kitchen, and I assumed it would be made with smoked goose like hers, so I was surprised to see this mix of ham, sausage and beef brisket-type-thing on top, which is more the way you get it in plain old gentile restaurants and lunch counters, where the good folk may eat it not even knowing of its Jewish origins. Irénke's recipe, which the next generations of the family have also mastered to an adequate level, is also drier, without the tomato and partially-pureed bean paste that forms the base here. They also could have added a bit more of the beans, which were delicious and, last time I checked, not a particularly budget-busting ingredient to serve. In fact, I would have happily sacrificed that bit of knuckle for another spoonful. Anyway, all very fine, but in retrospect if I had vacillated the other way over the sólet versus the stuffed goose neck, I probably would have gotten a more interesting entrée, and one that is kind of a pain to make at home whereas sólet is fairly straightforward. Oh well.

And with most of us having room for dessert, Móni got this flaming crêpe, which for some reason the camera does not agree was actually on fire at the moment of capture, which it was. I think this has something to do with the laws of physics.

Hope I don't have to take any drug tests

And I got this plate of dismembered honey-crêpes covered with poppyseeds.

Oh, I'm supposed to complain about stuff. We hit some kind of kitchen bottleneck and the last main arrived about ten minutes after the first. This can happen, and the waiter apologized profusely, so it's almost a shame to mention it, but that's my job, isn't it? Also guys, need to get that keg of expensive German beer sorted. A gentleman can't be expected to pour from those dainty 12 ounce bottles. This is the whole reason I left the United States.

In addition, they have a really good keyboardist whose talent was wasted on the international faux-classy schlock arrangements of Yesterday, My Way, Time to Say Goodbye, while Liszt's 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody seemed out of place, but he came into its own with the impro jazz that he finished the evening with, which is where his heart seemed to be. Maybe he should start with that too.

And back in the credit colum: we have at Rosenstein the clearly marked (on both menu and website) notice that 10% extra will be added to the total bill for service. Yes. This is the way of the future and we need to support it. It doesn't need to be 10%, it can be whatever your culture has settled on as an adequate percentage, but I hate tipping and tips. Just tell us the price and we'll pay it. The reward for good service is, maybe we'll come back.

On Arthur's Restaurant Scale based on an algorithm so complex, even I don't understand it, Rosenstein gets an 8.