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

JÉGKIRÁLYNŐ (ICE QÜEEN)

Király utca (formerly Majakovszkij utca) deserves a booklet, a photo album, descriptive poetry of its own. Everything that is dowdy, tacky about Budapest is condensed in this street. All that you can think of is up for sale, bric-a-brac, second-hand jersey skirts and cream pastries, trinkets and T-shirts, tangas in the summer and action videos summer and winter. Snackbars that reek of oil, sad cafeterias, small restaurants going down the drain, line the street. Decay is running its course but the winds of renewal can already be felt. Boutiques are opening, suspicious-looking characters sidle around the non-stop food-stores with wine bottles under their arms. Drunks float, horizontally, like cruise missiles, from the cafés towards Izabella utca and environs. And here for example is the Jégkirálynő café. A royalist incursion in Terézváros in this our republican age. An East German ice dancer? A Balkan queen dressed in a ball-gown? It makes no difference. She hands out ice-creams and sundaes majestically to her subjects. The flashing, coloured light-bulbs are there to put you in mind of Las Vegas. In the reddish brown interior the tables are pushed so close they almost touch. Cold, unapproachable waitresses shoo away undesirable customers and serve a wide range of Italian ice-cream. A little ice-cream kingdom within the Hungarian Republic.

69 KIRÁLY ÜTCA, VII.

JÉGKIRÁLYNŐ— an Ice Queen in the Republic

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