Bodor Ferenc: Coffee-Houses - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)
In the present depopulated, impoverished, hamburgerized realm of catering, hostile to customers, those more advanced in years recall the smoke-filled cafés with their yellowed silk lampshades and tinkling pianos with wistful nostalgia. The institution of the coffee-house—which did not flourish anywhere else in Eastern Europe—first appeared in Budapest before the war. Beside the legendary and since forgotten coffee-houses, cafés and coffee-bars opened one after the other during the second half of the thirties. Quick of Vigadó utca was the frist in 1937, its premises planned and created by interior and industrial designers. Today the building serves as an office. Yet at the time of their appearance, the little cafés (since mostly closed down) became the regular haunts of the milk-coated upper-class public in no time at all. Then came the war and the bombing of the city. But, as the tanks and cars gutted by fire were cleared off the streets, those cafés that could be opened were opened and soon filled with black marketeers —a bourgeois clientele made lax by the horrors of the siege. The radical left reacted without delay: Down with the black marketeers! Cinder lock and key with them! Set them to communal work! came the cry; and with these slogans many coffee-houses and cafés were closed down. The new wielders of power did not condone people getting together just to chat. After catering was brought under state control, huge empires came into being. Commonwealths of letcho and goulash. Yet the cafés somehow hung on. Beneath the grey and scarlet coating of the fifties it was in cafés that office love affairs blossomed and lonely gentlewomen found company. Customers would tie knots into the tassels of tablecloths kept flat and clean under sheets of glass. Cafés in the first half of the fifties were concerned only with survival. “We’ll hold out somehow until the relief forces arrive from Bicske.” The stylistic period generally termed “the fifties” in the West did not emerge in this country until the end of the decade. The change came after 1956, when the social realism in architecture had begun to wane and a young generation of interior decorators avid for everything fresh and new was given a free hand in the planning of public catering. Shops reduced to rubble during the fighting were to be rebuilt in “modern style”. Cell-shaped tables, metlachi tiles, Klee-patterned curtains, cone-shaped lamps, counters done up in mosaic. And fantastic streamlined espresso machines, all new, modem materials. And the neon signs, neon lemonade with neon bubbles and straws, and neon women with neon coffee-cups! This was 3
