Thankfully, for all lovers of falafel, Hummus Bars are now making chickpea waves across the city. This is the way falafel is meant to taste, with each and every ball freshly fried, making it crunchy and soft and delicious.
While some falafel only tastes good at three in the morning as you’re stumbling home drunk and confused. If you head back the next day, you’ll realize that in your inebriated state you took a pre-cooked, microwave-heated, soggy-ball-of-mush encased in floppy pita with brown salad, for something divine. Of course it wasn’t.
The success of the Hummus Bar revolution (they currently have 2, soon to be 3 locations) in Budapest is phenomenal. The smaller, cozier neighborhood restaurant on Kertész utca is owned by the charismatic Israeli Aviad Tarab, who has a passion for creating the sort of environment where people want to come back time and time again. “We see the same faces every day. I know all the customers here; we have foreign students who see this place as a second home. I ask about their exams and papers, we all know each other. We’re not so big, but we’re very friendly.”
Upstairs, it really is the sort of place you can while away the hours. A low ceiling, a clutch of tables and an originally designed interior make you feel as snug as a falafel in a pita. The menu, as you might expect from the name, is hummus heavy. You can choose from hummus phool, hummus mushrooms, hummus gargirim, hummus plate… you get the idea. There’s also great salad, chips, jemeni bean soup, green tea, a range of drinks and the previously glorified falafel.
What’s surprising about the place are the prices (i.e. falafel or hummus pita for 500 HUF). Even though they’re preparing everything fresh, unlike some of the falafel-pretenders around, they’re as cheap as chips. Even better, if you’re one of Budapest’s great unwashed student community then you get a 10 percent discount. If you haven’t got time to eat in, take away is available, but on these hot summer days a good lounge upstairs, with a cool draft beer from the pub across the road is a perfect escape from the sweaty city.
If you’re sick of being treated by staff in restaurants like you’ve just insulted their mother’s honor and sick of getting supposedly fresh food which was actually prepared when Hungary still had a coast, then the Hummus Bar on Kertész utca will enter your life like a blob of csípős sauce in your pita. They smile wide, they cook exquisitely and they want you to like them, and in a vegetarian-starved country like this, they more than succeed.
