You've really gotta love Hungarian cuisine to eat it in the summer, but the good news for lovers of nockerli dumplings, goulash and pancakes stuffed with walnut cream and drenched with chocolate syrup is that summer will soon be over.
Goulash Hungarian Restaurant recently replaced the Goulash Pot when the previous owner passed away, and is a huge improvement over its predecessor. It belongs to a young Hungarian chef, Peter Kelemen, who hails from the city of Kecskemet, south of Budapest, and displays the city's banner on one of the restaurant's walls like a high-school kid might do in his bedroom.
The chef cooks the rustic fare of his native land in a style I haven't seen anywhere in North America outside of Toronto, a cultural-mosaic city with Hungarian restaurants to burn on a street named Bloor.
A few local Hungarians urged me to eat in Kelemen's restaurant, and I was happy they did. On my first visit, he showed me a picture book of dishes he had cooked at a restaurant called Tanyacsarda in Hungary, fare like scones with goose cracklings, fried pike with garlic, and cheese-stuffed pastries. The menu here is more standardized, but Chef does specials every weekend, and occasionally, the dishes magically appear.
Call the décor plain and fancy. The walls are decorated with pictures of Hungarian peasants down on the farm or Gypsies on that country's vast central plain, the Hortobagy.
The first appetizer on the menu is korozott, seasoned farmer's cheese, a spread, really, colored a soft orange from mixing white cheese with red paprika, but don't bother ordering it. Kelemen's wife probably will bring you a small side dish of it with the house bread once you have ordered.
I have to smile when I think of the Hortobagy-style crepes, also listed as an appetizer. These are, after all, pancakes stuffed with ground veal and subsequently blanketed with a creamy paprika sauce. Any rational person has to wonder who, besides a Hungarian construction worker, is supposed to get hungry after eating an order.
It would be more prudent to begin a meal with one of the soups, any of which are served in a thing called a bogracs, or swinging kettle. Kelemen doesn't make his astoundingly good alfoldi, or Hungarian wedding soup, every day, but when it is available, do not miss it. Picture a mildly cream-infused chicken broth flavored with tarragon, brimming with tiny, homemade flour dumplings and minced pieces of white- and dark-meat chicken.
There is also what the menu calls beef stock with Hungarian livery dumplings: really dumplings made by mixing chopped liver into the dough. It's a strongly flavored soup, but actually quite light, and by Central European standards, downright feathery. That's not true of csulkos bean soup, a pot of stewed pintos flavored with a good deal of ham hock. Nonetheless, it's a soup I cannot resist.
The entrées are really quite filling, too, although not always as filling as they appear. The most famous dish in the repertory is beef goulash, chunked and stewed meat in a beefy red sauce laced with paprika, one of nature's best sources of vitamin C. If you're thinking the powdered spice at the corner supermarket, fuhgeddaboudit. This is powerful stuff from Szeged, Hungary, a city that is for Hungarians what Gilroy, California, is to Americans for garlic. In comparison, the spice we call paprika is but a pale reminder.
Naturally there is stuffed cabbage, huge rolls stuffed with sausage and rice in a piquant tomato and paprika sauce; and Wiener schnitzel—breaded veal which the Hungarians claim to have invented. But by far my favorite entrée here is disznotoros, the farmer's plate, starring three types of sausages made by the chef himself. One is a spicy kielbasa type, the other two are made with liver and rice, differentiated by one being white, the other deep red from the addition of pork blood. Along for the ride are terrific Hungarian-style mashed potatoes and caramelized red cabbage. It's all the stuff of dreams.
Also justly famous are chicken paprikas, chicken and dumplings, really, except that the bland American sauce is replaced by a zesty sour cream, lard and paprika sauce; and brassoi tenderloin tidbits, hunks of meat and potatoes fried up with just "a little garlic." Riiiight.
On the side, order a cold, mildly sweet and garlicky pickled-cabbage salad (which Hungarians seem to eat with every meal, even breakfast), or a simpler tomato salad. The beverage of choice here is soda water mixed with raspberry syrup, and for dessert, those aforementioned crepes, which the menu refers to as Gundel crepes, after Budapest's most famous restaurant.
Some say that this has been a cool summer, but for some reason, I can't wait for it to end.