Porhászka László: The Danube Promenade - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1998)

Ambassadeur, a new luxury restaurant-cum-bar with live music but no dance floor was arranged in a room partitioned off the Café Dunacorso by its owner Lajos Paulin.

Paulin deserves special mention here. As recounted by Imre Gundel and Judit Harmath in their A vendéglátás emlékei (Monuments of Catering), Paulin was trained in the Ritz where he afterwards worked as a head waiter. He devoted his life to the promenade gaining ownership of Negresco founded in 1931, the Prince of Wales opened in 1934 and, from 1940 on, the Dunacorso. This means that together with the Ambassadeur he had four establishments on the Danube by the early forties without which the contemporary promenade would have been unthinkable.

Hungary entered the war as an ally of the axis powers on 21 July 1941. On the promenade the Hangli became a veritable news exchange. Those in the know (or believing themselves to be in the know) compared notes here discussing the latest developments of the war as well as domestic and foreign politics.

Others felt that more was needed than café discussions. On 15 March 1942, the Hungarian Historical Memorial Committee organised a demonstration by the Petőfi statue at the southern end of the promenade to demand the war be ended. Passers-by on the promenade and guests sitting at the tables of the Hangli must have looked on in

Pál Pátzay: Petőfi (1942)

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