Saly Noémi: Café?! Változatok és változások Időszaki kiállítás 2007. február–május (Budapest, 2007)

eggs. Night-lodgers. In the paper Robert Falus, Zoltán Héra and Gábor Hajdú Ráfis doled out their crumbs of wisdom, while Imre Csatár was the supposed humanist. Gábor Garai was the poet, István Hermann the incarnation of the philosopher.' (Miklós Gáspár Tamás: „Mi teremtettünk itt szabadságot és nyomort" [We created freedom and misery here]. Élet és Irodalom, 21 July 2000) If the Budapest Encyclopaedia is to be believed - these statistics will certainly be checked and revised later - in 1971 there were 348 and in 1990 just 232 espresso bars in the capital. (~, p. 397) The larger waves of activity establishing public cafés and its modifications in structure were never linked to notable events in politics, but followed their own laws. We experienced this even in connection with 1989, the most recent great change in our lives. From the beginning there were many of us who waited for years in vain, wondering if finally new, 'livable' coffee places would open, God forbid someone should turn up and embark on reviving one of the old 'grand cafés'! But for a long time nothing at all happened, except that the worn-out espresso bars closed or were altered one after the other. Ferenc Bodor's 1992 volume entitled Pesti presszók [Budapest Espresso Bars], in its own day might have seemed for a moment to be a guidebook to these, but it soon turned out it was merely a spiritual wave of farewell to the long drawn-out era of socialist espresso bars. As I say, nothing happened for a very long time, nothing at all. Even in the mid-1990s we could count on one hand the places we could go ai all; and the nights were as bleak and dismal as if there were a war and a blackout going on. Then bit-by-bit places began to open here and there, though sometimes they quickly closed again, like for instance, the first-rate Árlista m Párisi Passage, the place of all our hopes, the Central which operated lor years as the Eólvös Club and went through hell at the end of the lasi century when it became a cavern of gaming machines. The fact that we were witnessing a half-hearted start to a new wave of opening cafés, only became evident around 1998, but the majority of places in existence today opened their doors in the third millennium. And so we arrive at the year 2004, when ihe guidebook to Budapest cafés mentioned above was published. I will not repeal here what I wrote in the preface lo the book about the characteristics of the new wave of cafés, especially since the places that have opened since have nol, in effect, altered the typology that I outlined then - perhaps the headway made by the shopping mall cafés is conspicuous - and the predictions made have proved, for the most part, to be accurate. Nevertheless, the fact that of the fifty places described, today a little less than two years later, five stand empty or are operating under another name, while another five have been somewhat altered, clearly demonstrates ihe speed of the changes. The shifts in their entirety are on an even larger scale as regards the places listed in the index at the end of the guide, which was not complete even at the time. Today their number easily surpasses five hundred. At the same time, this somewhai broader perspective offers the opportunity lo make some observations evaluating the new wave of setting up cafés now going on lor a decade, and to commit to paper our expectations. First of all we can say that the breakthrough has occurred - and not only in Budapest but across the entire country, even in the cities of the successor stales with a partly Hungarian population. The decisive majorit}' of