Bodor Ferenc: Coffee-Houses - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1992)

Ara (bride)

As there is a registry office in the adjacent building in Balsac utca, let us suppose that young brides often drop in here on their way there: this may justify the practically illegible but very expressive red neon sign. This is a place that is rounded off all over. Only the seats, cake-like is shape and colour, are square beneath the conspicuously overweight customers. Perhaps no other type of chair could support such a burden. The port-hole motif is repeated along the entire length of the bar counter and the new unvarnished panelling indicates that Planned Preventive Maintenance knows its job and is doing it well. In the back room, surprisingly, there is live music, a drum synthesizer, a piano, a singer—a folk tradition doomed to become extinct and thus all the more precious. Unfortunately, the place is not frequented by the middle-class of Lipótváros, but at least this way social equilibrium may be attained.

37 BALZAC UTCA, XIII.

The prettiest neon sign above the entrance of the ARA

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