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Budapest Shines - Page 2
By Tom Kagy | 17 Jun, 2025
This majestic capital of Hungary deserves the title Grand Duchess of the Danube.
From admiring the Church we walked toward the view offered by the entry to the double stairway descending the view side of Fisherman's Bastion when we were captivated by a live rendition of "Hey, Soul Sister" coming from the other side of the tall statue of Saint Stephen. The Train song had never charmed me until that moment, in the dusk of a Budapest evening by the statue of Saint Stephen in the broad cobblestone plaza on the southwest corner of Mattias Church. To investigate we rounded the broad base on which Saint Stephen was posing and discovered a young Chinese man with a guitar and a tip box.
This evening view of the Hungarian Parliament was taken from across the Danube on the Buda side of the city.
He was Fun Zhi (phonetic spelling) from Yunnan on a busking tour of 15 countries, we learned upon striking up a conversation. We asked him to sing another song, preferably English, for our camera. Fun Zhi treated us to a memorable command performance of "Hey, Jude" (shared elsewhere on Golsea).
A side street on the northern end of the Buda Castle complex offers this surprising view of the spectacular bell tower of Mattias Church adjacent to Fisherman's Bastion.
For dinner we considered the two restaurants on the grounds of Fisherman's Bastion. For both the main draw was their magnificent views. One offered two row of tables lined up along an enclosed stretch of stone rampart adjacent to the square with the statue of St Stephen. The other was a fine dining place called Halászbástya Étterem (Fisherman's Bastion Restaurant), offering a prix-fixe tasting menu in several tiers for astronomical amounts of Hungarian forint (US $1 = ~350 Ft), or in dollars, $90 - $130 per head. The first restaurant had a waiting line and the second wouldn't open until later and appeared to require reservations.
The Buda Castle complex atop a hill on the Buda side of the Danube contains an incongruous amount of modern street life.
We descended the hundred-twenty feet or so of elevation via a half dozen flights of steps and a couple of steep streets toward the river. About a block from the Park Plaza Hotel is Horgásztanya Vendéglő (Angler Farm Restaurant), a restaurant we had noted earlier on our walk up to the Bastion as having an extensive fish menu. An abundance of wood and red gingham tablecloths gave it a homey touch.
This view of Buda Castle is from its northwest side. At the center is Mattias Fountain, a popular photo op.
We ordered roasted salmon with kohlrabi puree with white wine and taragon and grilled vegetables, and chicken paprikash with dill cottage cheese pasta. And beer, of course, along with mineral water. Any dinner would have felt vaguely unnatural without beer in that part of Europe.
We were pleased to find the food cooked and seasoned to our taste, with portions hearty but consumable, unlike the surfeit we had generally experienced in Czechia and Slovakia. Even so we felt the need to walk off at least part of the meal by taking a circuitous route back. Despite having explored two castles in two cities on that Monday, we were less tired than we had been during our long walking Sunday in Bratislava.
DAY TWO
The Park Plaza breakfast buffet was about par for a four-star hotel. It was served in three separate dining areas. We were only able to find open tables in a somewhat enclosed area without windows. Among the diners were some Americans who, by their casual, functional dress, relative youth and conversation, appeared to be members of a film crew on location.
We planned to spend the day heading south past the Széchenyi Lánchíd (Széchenyi Chain Bridge), then to cut uphill to explore Buda Castle, before going across the bridge to the Pest side. After passing the bridge we saw the Castle Funicular (Budavári Felső Sikló) which climbs the 120-foot rise along its 230-foot track. We thought it might be a fun tourist moment, but the long ticket line proved to be excruciatingly slow-moving, and we decided to walk up. The path up, we decided, would be more pleasant than paying about $8 each way per head to be sardined into a funicular car for a four-minute ride.
We found the path for the climb up a few yards north of the funicular station. After about ten minutes along a walkway that curved gently toward the north we ended up at approximately front and center of the extensive castle hill area, with Buda Castle about three hundred yards to our left and Fisherman's Domain about four hundred yards to our right.
For a change the weather was warm and mostly sunny on that Tuesday, the first such weather during our initial five days in Central Europe. We strolling north along the main promenade lined with attractive shops and restaurants, feeling as though we were experiencing a living modern castle town. We turned west toward the edge of castle hill to enjoy views of the valley on the opposite side of the Danube.
By the time we reached the northern end of our walk along the western perimeter of the hill area we felt the need to discharge and to take in fluids. We settled into a patio table of Ramazuri restaurant. After ordering coffee and water I looked up and was pleasantly surprised to be facing a dead-on view of the southwestern face of Mattias Church, with the tall elegant bell tower in the foreground. It was a eureka moment in which our walk of the previous evening became geographically integrated with that day's.
After stopping briefly to buy souvenirs, we walked back southward to explore Buda Castle. Much of the area near the castle was blocked off for construction, requiring our walking path to detour around them. As we approached the central palace area, we saw emerging from the central courtyard a long row of about a dozen black gleaming SUVs and limousines in stately procession. Not knowing at the time that the Castle's Sandor Palace was the official residence of the Hungarian president Tamás Sulyok (not the better known autocratic Russia-leaning leader Viktor Orban who has been Prime Minister since 2010), we speculated the procession might have been a setup for a film production.
We walked all the way down to the main courtyard of the Castle which forms the southern end of the castle hill area. Those who revel in the decorative arts of past cultures can experience the interiors of renovated medieval structures at the National Library, National Museum and Buda Chapel, all accessible from the courtyard.
A star photo-op attraction is the Castle is the ornate Fountain of King Mattias on the north side of the Castle. We waited our turn to be memorialized in front of the fountain, which features an elaborate bas-relief depiction of a hunt. Then came the top photo-op at the Castle — the front parapet overlooking the Danube, the Chain Bridge and most of downtown Budapest on the other side. Our dalliance there, in the company of the grand statue of Prince Eugene of Savoy, was probably the most visually monumental scene of our trip to that point.
Not knowing at the time that the Castle's Sandor Palace was the official residence of the Hungarian president Tamás Sulyok (not the better known autocratic Russia-leaning leader Viktor Orban who has been Prime Minister since 2010), we speculated the procession might have been a setup for a film production.
Mattias Fountain on the north side of the main Buda Castle structure depicts a hunting scene.
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