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

Gyula Zeke 'One could open a café for that price...!

1 Foreward to an exhibition of pictures When on November 25 2001, the exhibition entitled 'Grand Café Budapest' - also the title ol the essential novel by Lajos Nagy - opened its doors at the Ernst Museum to a public thirsting for the past and craving for the present of this fascinating subject - we stood looking in amazement right up to January 6 2002, at the exceptionally rich material assembled by curators Noémi Saly and Ambrus Gönczi. We stood there and walked around from room to room before the displays on the walls and in glass cases, feasting our eyes, and we knew that these stills and'moving pictures, these cups and tables, the sofa from a calé private box or 'séparé' and these sounds, would never be gathered together like this again. And while we felt sad at the thought, we were also a little perplexed as to when we could organize some similar exhibition in Budapest again and what approach it would take. For though we were satisfied that the comrades' notion had failed and they had not been able to sweep away the past, it was also clear that to evoke the cafes again like this would not only he impossible for practical reasons, but would not be worthwhile or even desirable. Memory has its own stages; the truth of this statement is regularly proved by personal experience and divides the paths ol collective memory with a force that cannot be ignored. Thus we knew that one cannot step back into that same past a second lime nor did we want to do so. At the same time we looked, expectant and worried, into the uncertain future, which we assumed would hold plenty of unpleasant surprises beyond the impudent fact ol our ageing. But we could not know where future developments would lead us, our eyes misted over with caffeine. Looking back it is easy to sum up in one sentence our expectations spurred on by the city's café lile at the time, already promising, but full ol doubt. We had done something for the past, now it was the turn of the present reality. And the reality was lhat, for the first time in our lives, the cafés had at last made a stand, even if the old 'grand cafés', for the most part could no longer do so, because they had been taken over by banks and last food chains. More and more new places opened calling themselves cafés, coffee houses, coffee-shops, at least that among other functions, and it soon became clear that Budapest, in terms of the public consumption of coffee, was finally undergoing an vast fever of activity again, the new boom years. It was also clear and there would be no hazard in stating that following the sporadic new development of the mid-nineties, this boom began to gam ground in the last two years of the millennium and gathered force after ihe turn of the century, becoming a mass phenomenon in the following couple ol years. By the autumn of 2004, this process made it a matter of urgency to put together a guide book to cafés, which I had the honour ol doing with my colleague Aliona Franki and which was published in March 2005. (Kávézók kalauza. Kavéhcizak, kávézók és presszók Budapesten a harmadik évezred küszöbén. [Café Guide. Calés, coffee shops and espresso bars in Budapest on the threshold of the third millennium.] Budapest, Enciklopédia Kiadó, 152 pp.) The majority of places that had opened up to that time are apparently still functioning and ihe lever ol activity in