Bodor Ferenc: Coffee-Houses - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)
Anna In his time, the not-yet-revisionist Gyula Háy was not pleased with the Háen patisserie, the predecessor of the Anna. Later, socialist catering was not pleased by the decadent Anna, priding itself on its juke-box. Nowadays it is probably the pizzeria and auto showroom owners who loathe it more than most. A Hitsumishi privatizer may already be lurking at the corner. The Anna is refined, even if she is a ruin of what she once was. She has udergone as much plastic surgery as Zsazsa Gábor, has been cut up and her interior spaces enlarged, her refronted portal ruined. And they have sacked the sad girl who used to sit in front of the juke-box and write down the customers’ requests in a little notebook, for young people would keep feeding old coins into the magic machine to listen to Connie Francis. The Anna is now a mixture of macédoine and pound cake, like a woman grown insipid over the years. Yet fashionable music plays in the elegant salon in the back. But the non-conformist young fashion-dictators of the fifties who so willingly imitated the West have long disappeared or dispersed, and the rest are busy arranging the details of their statutory retirement. 7 VÁCI UTCA, V. ANNA 15
