pocket diary budapest: Budapest Baristas

Showing posts with label Budapest Baristas. Show all posts

Sunday, 7 February 2016

When February Thinks It's March

I have always been at odds with February, and, judging by past events, February was often at odds with me. Looking back, I can recall two types of February, or more precisely one: bloody awful Februaries. The other type would be Februaries I really can't remember, odd brackets of time between January and long awaited March when something must have definitely happened, like I probably ordered pizza, watched some football and forgot the most important item on a shopping list.

This year, however, I have a strange feeling that February is trying to mend our relationship. Mainly, by pretending to be March. At which it will fail, because the holiday planted in its middle is not the sublime Guinness drinking fest of Saint Patrick's day, but the 'let's recycle unused red wrapping paper' and 'let's bridge the marketing no man's land between Christmas and Easter' monstrosity that is Valentine's Day. I pity poor Saint Valentine for all the slack he gets, but he really could have chosen something wiser to be the patron saint of, like maybe trade a country with Saint George or something. This being said, the mild weather (which I am mentioning here only as context, you see) means many usually March timed flowers have already started to pop up at the florists, and I have duly purchased my first daffodils of the season and then ran into gerberas and roses during my coffee shop rounds, in Budapest Baristas and Espresso Embassy respectively.

I have also managed to finally stray off the beaten track and made it to The Goat Herder's- which is actually only a twenty minutes walk from Oktogon, so my only excuse for not having gone there is being both lazy and a slave to my habits. The twenty minutes of jolly walk in the balmy February sun (note more efforts to be March, or straightaway April) were rewarded with coffee, which was excellent, but even more so with tea, as in real English five o'clock tea with milk and cake and a touch of Mad Hatter's tea party about it. While pottering about the same area, and getting just a bit lost for a few minutes, I also wandered into the lobby of the Bethlen theatre, to discover a dazzling array of retro stuff complete with chintz and dubious china and stumbled upon a building with decidedly pleasant stained glass windows, which happens to be the Bethlen square synagogue.

Returning to the Művész coffee house on Andrássy was however a letdown- the drinks are ridiculously expensive and there's about a gazillion plastic flowers too many for comfort. It's outright painful to see that a place that could focus on keeping the old coffee house culture of the city alive chooses to stray into murky tourist trap territory instead. I shall therefore stick to the safe haven of places such as Massolit, where you can have both coffee and a great cake at the most decent of prices, and indulge in a peaceful read or conversation on the side.

February's final flurry will be the premiere of the Coen brothers' Hail Caesar, which I look forward to with the most giddy of excitements, but until then I shall indulge in some recommendations I found beside a table in Castro Bistro- a table I was grumpy about at first, due to it's not so strategic positioning close to the door-further evidence that fate so very often simply knows better.

Monday, 18 January 2016

First Random of 2016

Before we tackle any other subject, it must be noted that the prized exhibit of this series of shots is the absolutely worst picture taken of the festive trolley bus by anyone this season or, possibly, ever. If Henri Cartier-Bresson considered the decisive moment to be the best moment for taking a shot, this particular one was clearly taken at the worst moment. Since it’s also one of the first pictures of the year- well, I don’t know what that means, hopefully that it’ll be all uphill from here.

The up side is that, since it’s such a splendid failure, I very vividly recall the moment it was taken- I have a few other shots like that, mostly concert snaps which happened about a millisecond after the decisive moment, and are therefore of a somewhat undecisive nature. Yet, strangely, I remember them, in their possible yet never materialized glory, better than I remember some shots I actually took.

The rest is mostly fog and sunrises, as January is always about the mornings- the sunset comes so quickly that I am almost always caught up in something else and miss it altogether, whereas at dawn I am prowling after coffee just as the light breaks. Or alternatively I am getting chilled to the bone by a decidedly londonish wet fog, which looks great in pictures but is a pain to be in- literal joint pain and the very real struggle of pressing the shutter release button.

Friday, 25 December 2015

Best of 2015- Coffee Cups

As opposed to cats, coffee took quite a long time to grow on me. When everyone was downing cup after cup during exam sessions, I would put on a refrained smile and keep on reaching for my can of Coke. Mind you, I still love Coke, and it’s one of those things, like Coldplay, that I plan to be forever unapologetic about. Yes, it’s an explosion of sugar and artificial flavour enhancers (just like Coldplay, come to think of it), but even the distant fizz of a can being opened puts me in a state- I know, it’s called addiction, but everyone needs the poison of their choice.

So back to coffee, I did have a nice big cuppa one night before my American history exam, and then at 4 am, when I could recite all the amendments of the constitution pretty much by heart but was still staring at my bedroom ceiling with my limbs shaking I said no more of this lethal brown liquid, and to this principle I stayed true for almost a decade.

Then, about three years ago, one fine morning in January I said, well, it’s kind of cold and I’m sort of sleepy, maybe I could have a latte. So I did. A big latte filled with honey and agave syrup- more precisely, what today I call a crime against both humanity and common sense, surpassed only by the green monstrosity of matcha latte. Next day I said, well why not have that latte again. A hundred or so days later I gave up on the honey, and then the agave syrup departed from my life as well.

Soon enough, I discovered that I was craving morning caffeine to degrees which could not be properly serviced by a latte. So I switched to flat whites. And then, on another epic day, in Italy, as luck would have it, I discovered that I could simply have a pitch dark espresso.

And ever since, I have measured my life with coffee cups. Or with distances from one coffee shop to another- of which there are plentiful in Budapest, because we are painfully cool, I know. And still, I have missed a few, so I might as well add visiting them to those new year's resolutions I never manage to keep and see if for once I succeed.