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Tigris: Grand Lux Budapest™.

Budapest, Mérleg u. 10, 1051 Hungary / 17 октября 2017

Perhaps, each of us has a fairy-tale image of a perfect restaurant in mind, of a classical one, such a 101% restaurant. It was input inside our brains back when we hadn’t even been to a restaurant yet or did visit, but with parents in our early childhood; later on this idea got reinforced through watching movies or reading books/flipping through magazines.

It’s all very vintage and wooden inside, with crystal lanterns in the form of may-lilies. Waiters wear 3 piece suits; the visitors are mature and look like Jules Verne. The place sparkles with crystal glass and big patterned silver forks. They serve some mad tasty cozy dishes with game meat (which as we know, though have never had, should be eaten with one’s hands). By default, it’s located on a silent street of a spy city with pointed roofs a la Budapest. Oh yeah, I almost forgot, the furniture is strictly modern or jugend-style, and the name of the place is written on the windows in the art-deco font, upon an azure opaque stripe.

Can you imagine it?

And I guess you’ve even come across one of them, huh? They usually recommend you such a place at the reception of a 5L hotel.

Then, for sure, you know the end of this tale: there isn’t like absolutely fucking nothing tasty about it. Fucking hell. The princess turned into a pumpkin.

When they told us about this place (because the Anton man got confused with the dates and booked a fancy Michelin restaurant “for tomorrow” (which afterwards turned out to be some horrible trash)):

“Klasszikus, klasszikus! Hungarian tradicionális klasszikus, and many/many foie gras!”

… I immediately got nerves: the hotel had four fancy restaurants, two of which were dedicated to foie gras (so it was). But when I asked where we should go, the girl straight away said:

“To Tigris. Go to Tigris.”

It was sort of weird.

Ok, let’s go then.

Further, everything was as I described above, including waiters aged 40+ and elderly people of luxury lifestyle, whom you envy for their old age and who drink in excitedly while having dishes with boar and telling each other good stories.

Everything’s exclusively local starting from mineral water up to cheese. And all of it is really good.

There’s a separate menu for foie gras: 5 cold and 3 hot items.

And some incredible Hungarian wines.

The board has 8 specialties of the day.

There’s various game meat including boar, which doesn’t come like some ragout mash, but just like proper meat.

Everything’s perfect, and there is no point in describing the food: it’s made in such a way that finding any fault with it is nearly impossible.

Next, you order something else, but rather than a dessert you get a set of extremely-tasty complicated cold foie gras (€12) and let it all down with ice cold sweet riesling, which has some metallic notes, and keep silent, staring at each other for quite a while.

And then you also get a dessert made of chestnut cream with orange sorbet.

It was one of my best nights ever. But make sure right people come along: you’ll have to stay there for a long time and you’ll be drunk.

PS: Alright, and no one’s trying to fuck you over there(!) – the sommelier girl almost burst into tears: two times in a row she had an expensive item (each time different) spoiled because of the cork’s smell. She replaced the bottles without even tasting the wines.

Budapest, Mérleg u. 10, 1051 Hungary