New York Café

A tourist trap or not? A question raised by many people who consider visiting Budapest's New York Café. I can’t answer that for you, but I can lay out some facts. The New York Café has been a tourist attraction since the 1930s. It is surely the most spectacular coffeehouse in Budapest, if not the whole world, but also the kind of place where an hour-plus wait for a table isn't unusual and where a cup of cappuccino costs €11. Needless to say: most locals don't go near it.

The New York Café occupies the ground floor of the New York Palace, an imposing building along Budapest’s Grand Boulevard commissioned in 1894 by the New York Life Insurance Company to house its offices and rental apartments (today the five-star Anantara Hotel is upstairs).

The coffeehouse’s prime was the pre-WWI period, when renowned Hungarian journalists and writers such as Ferenc Molnár spent unruly nights here under the sky-high ceiling. The place continued to operate as a coffeehouse for much of the Communist period, although with a less western-sounding name (“Hungária”).

After a 2006 gut-renovation, the New York Café has regained its completely unbridled interior, featuring ceiling paintings, bronze statues, gilded putti, and heavy chandeliers. I’m pretty sure it’s the only coffeehouse with Solomonic marble columns and a Bernini-esque baldachin.

As with other major tourist attractions, prices are absurdly high and the food – Hungarian and Habsburg classics – solid but far from memorable. Every day, a Gypsy band plays live music for fifteen minutes between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m.

All this to say: the New York Café isn’t a classic tourist trap and if you are a Baroque fan like me or after an unusual selfie, then you should probably get in that line. Otherwise, save your time and money and go someplace else. For example, my beloved Cafe Astoria.