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

Customers are no longer served at the tables but must line up at the serving hatch for their food. You can still get half-portions. Oxtail soup, jam pudding. Csabi’s certificate hangs on the wall. People come from plants and factories nearby. The food is good. The bill of fare is hand-written on parchment-thin paper, carbon-copied. There is a copy out in the street beside the entrance in a wooden box fixed on the wall.

Csabi closes around three.

Rámpa Vendéglő The Ramp Restaurant

VI. Lehel utca 1/A

A legend. It owes its name to the platforms of the Western Railway Station nearby. If you walk along the first part of Váci út, alongside the stone wall enclosing the station, you come to the flyover bridge named after Ferdinand (Ace-worker). In front of you stands a long house, with a courtyard-side balcony diagonal to the street. Endless open corridors, white globes placed at regular intervals above the doorways. It is most beautiful at night, when these white lamps are alight. You get an oblique view of the open corridors of the house from Váci út. This is the house that Lehel út begins with, and on the ground floor you’ll find the famous old boozer, the Rámpa. It is a very simple place with two rooms, tables in the back for the card-playing regulars, stand-up counters, a bar, cheap beer up front. Above the bar, naturally, a piece of humour. It is more a country pub than a city one.

Lehel Vendéglő Lehel Restaurant

III. Lehel út 17/d

This mostly deserted “restaurant” on the ground floor of an underpinned building is also a pub. I drop in sometimes, there are one or two customers, the waitress is chatting at one of the tables, the tenants from the first floor are sitting with expressionless faces, eyes glued to the television screen. The whole pub is one high-ceilinged, spacious, brown room. A very sad place. 1 like it even better than the Rámpa.

30