Kocsis Irma: A tour of our Locals. (A very quick one) - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1993)

one step up. And you’ve arrived. We may have passed under the door of the building. It is a pleasant place, well worth visiting.

Ellike Régiségboltja.- “Alkudni lehet” Ellike’s Antiques: “Haggling permitted”

This is not a pub. It is in the back of the courtyard of an enormous block of flats painted hospital-green on the Podmaniczky (Rudas) corner. Not far from the passport office of the Ministry of the Interior, which was at one time a masonic Grand Lodge full of skeletons, dusty velvets and secrets, as is fitting. Ellike’s shop is tiny and there is plenty of dusty velvet, and behind the lace gowns and furs of the last century heaped on the grey metal shelves there may well be skeletons lurking, though the foraging hands of the smart, pretty actresses and models and theatrical costumiers never reach that far.

Ellike sometimes makes me a present of the life story of an interesting person or two. I have never bought anything for myself in her shop, for which I am always offering excuses, but she doesn’t mind. She says “Never mind, Endre, buying’s not the point.”

Csabi Étkezdéje Csabi’s Eating-House

XIII. (Bulcsú utca) Lehel út 5

There are two passings under the tracks of the Nyugati Pályaudvar (Western Railway Station), the second is a long, narrow tunnel that leads you to Bulcsú utca where you’ll find the best eating-house of the city, to my mind. Some time back Csabi, a man about forty, used to sit on a chair beside the door in a white smock and after eating you had to line up to pay at his counter. He kept the change in a soup-plate and his feet on a stack of newspapers to keep them warm. The soda siphon with the long hose attached to it, like in factories, is still there under the forest poster of the back wall, and customers are welcome to serve themselves. They are also welcome to serve themselves with soft drinks out of the fridge. There used to be a football on the shelf behind a little curtain.

29