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

the Lukács on Váci utca, the patisseries on Margaret Island and on Svábhegy and the Szalay). The Lukács at Váci utca 7 used the term 'café-confectionary' and the branch at Szépkilátás utca 1 on Svábhegy, the phrase 'café-patisserie'. Thus it is evident that the owners of the larger patisseries were trying to obtain the necessary official permits to trade as cafés. In some cases they even managed to surmount the smoking ban. Miklós Rózsa, writer of a monograph on the Auguszt dynasty, relates from personal experience seeing Sándor Márai spending his time lingering and working in the pipe smoke in one ol the boxes looking onto the street at the Auguszt on Krisztina körút, m the most café-like fashion. And in fact one of the photographs of the thirties interior clearly shows the nickel plated ashtrays characteristic of the café. Though it may be that their everyday activities did not revolve around coffee, we must mention restaurants among the establishments competing with the cafés in the public sphere of city. In the last year before war broke out there were over one thousand five hundred in Budapest. It was the larger restaurants among them that meant competition for the cafés, for they themselves served several kinds of good coffee. The close comparison in space and the considerable sociological similarity of their clientele, made them almost natural adversaries. Finally, from the turn of the twentieth century onwards, the café owners got the upper hand in this struggle. Up to that point, the advantage they had was their non-stop twenty-lour opening hours. However, after a persistent and lengthy struggle with the restaurant trade association, which was the price they paid, the café owners succeeded in obtaining the right from the municipal authorities to offer hot food for twenty-four hours. As a result, the café finally became the leading establishment in the public sphere of the city and their customers received the greatest possible number of services at the least possible cost. The organic structure for the public consumption of coffee, built up over two centuries, finally broke down at the start of the 1930s with the emergence of espresso bars in Budapest. The new institution of accelerated times originating in Italy, with its novel technique of coffee-making, gained a foothold m the city with the first celebrated machine to put its steam mechanism at the service of coffee making in 1924 at the Spolarich Café, so that in 1928 the first espresso bar in Pest could open as a part of the Grand Hotel Royal complex on the Grand Boulevard. It was not to remain alone for long, with 29 espresso bars already listed m the 1943 edition of the telephone book - obviously not all of them. From the outset the espresso bars created disapproval and even vehement opposition on the part of the café proprietors. They sensed correctly that they were faced with a new adversary and that time was not on their side. While the coffee bars primarily meant competition in terms of quantity and price and were intellectually rooted in Budapest prior to its becoming a large city, it was exactly the opposite in the case of espresso bars: they embodied a challenge ol modernisation that was hitherto unknown. In the outstanding volume by the scion of the renowned restaurateur dynasty, Imre Gundel (Imre Gundel - Judit Harmath: A vendéglátás emlékei [Memoirs of the Catering Industry], Budapest, Publisher: Közgazdasági és Jogi Könyvkiadó, 1982, p.

199) is mistaken when he refers to the Quick espresso bar thai opened on Vigadó utca m 1937 as the first in Budapest, though his description of the operation of the place is enlightening. Although the space - cramped according to the standards of the time - could not accommodate more than fifty customers at a time, it managed to serve