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

KÁVÉS KATICA

The rallying songs have faded and died on the corner of Váci út and Gogol utca; with the banishment of the trams the road structure has gone all to pieces, there are no street islands. There are fewer women with shopping bags and fewer proles with briefcases under their arms. So a café that evokes romantic operas has become outdated. Its past could be pieced together from the old crime columns of the Esti Hírlap. Hold-ups and simple rip-offs and factious horse-dealers looking for trouble are engulfed by blue lights and are lost in time. Kávés Katica was partitioned and in consequence has become restaurant-like in some ways, retaining some of its original savour and atmosphere due to the glorious red plastic overlay above the cunning and dynamic boarded ceiling, decorated with triangles. Its ornamental cast-stone flooring was worn among others by Princ, the legendary soldier. Beneath the FIDESZ-orange globes repose a coffee-mill and percolator that could count as industrial relics. In the back, on the shelves, bottles of CJnicum overgrown with creepers and ferns from the era of nationalization preceding the age of joint ownership. On the wall behind the dining section, nourishing meals appear through the metal-framed hatch, to be placed on customer’s tables. In the evenings the conservatively arcing high-quality neon casts its light upon the empty square of the market opposite, recalling old times.

54 VÁCI ÓT, XIII.

KÁVÉS KATICA- with Dracula

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