Costes Restaurant (Ráday Street)

In 2010, Costes Ráday was the first restaurant in Hungary to earn a Michelin star, but many chefs have come and gone, and many fine dining places have sprouted in Budapest since then. Costes's current conceit is a hard-to-define collection of seven courses inspired by the techniques of French fine dining traditions. Some are very tasty (slices of celery root molded in the shape of a ravioli and filled with a flavorful spread of stracciatella cheese and smoked eggplant), but on recent visits I often felt that more than a dozen years after its opening, Costes is due for a revamp.

Both the dark interior, which brings to mind, unironically, the idea of luxury across post-Communist countries in the 1990s, and the unfocused culinary direction. Fine dining has evolved in ways that Costes has not – service teams tend to be more casual but better informed these days, for example. Note that Costes Ráday has a sister location in downtown (Costes Downtown), also fine dining, but with a more casual air.