HeHe Chinese Restaurant (和和美食)

If you’re looking for tasty and affordable Chinese food in Budapest, HeHe is one of your best bets. The restaurant serves an array of excellent Chinese dishes from a modest, undecorated space in Budapest's Chinatown (Monori Center), reachable in 25 minutes from the city center by public transport.

The dishes are inspired by all parts of China, but the main focus is Sichuan, meaning that most plates are spicy. My favorites include the sizzling black pepper beef, the hot cabbage salad with sprinkles of roasted pork belly (ganguobaocai), the classic dan dan noodles, and the double-cooked pork belly (hui guo rou). If you come with a bigger group, order the whole carp, arriving in a boiling chili oil drizzled with Sichuan peppercorns (shui zhu yu).

HeHe's other claim to fame is the Lanzhou-style hand-pulled (lamian) and shaved (dao xiao mian) beef noodle soups. You can peek through the kitchen door and watch the noodle chef swiftly transforming the wheat flour into perfectly linear rows of white noodles and depositing them into the boiling broth.

HeHe is one of the few Chinese restaurants in Budapest that serves breakfast, too. Chinese employees from Monori Center flock here early in the mornings for affordable deep-fried dough sticks (youtiao), steamed buns, pickled vegetables, hard-boiled duck eggs, and warm soy milk.