Bodor Ferenc: Coffee-Houses - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)
The CAPRI before closing America, with glittering juke-boxes that played the latest Bill Haley and Elvis Presley. This period of modernizing did not last too long, but some examples are memorable to this day: the old Tlapoletana, the Dunacorso, or the Szabadsághíd cafés. Towards the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, a wave of wainscotted rusticity reared its head which, supplemented with the beer-bar craze of the brass maffia, has made catering premises characterless and undis- tinctive. The decline is only speeded up by the new “cool” places, the world of pizzerias and snack bars. Coffee-houses and cafés have had their day, in present-day Budapest at least. Hi-fi stores, bars and shops, eyesores all, have taken their place. The old cafés —like the Quint in the city hall building, a symbol of times past, one-time sanctuary of burghers and lovers — are slowly disappearing. It seems that catering at the close of the century does not like to see people just sitting and drinking coffee. In discarded mirrors we can still dimly discern the silhouette of the man-in-the-street, but the vision is illusion or nostalgia. Other kinds of high old times are coming into fashion. 4
