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

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