The 22 Best Fine Dining Restaurants In Budapest

In 2010, Costes was the first restaurant in Hungary to earn a Michelin star. Today, despite the fact that Budapest boasts many Michelin-starred places, Costes still has a special cachet. The restaurant is once again helmed by Portuguese chef Miguel Rocha Vieira, under whom Costes first won its Michelin accolade and who for several years cut his teeth in the kitchens of legendary Spanish chef Ferran Adrià.

Stand Restaurant is the fine dining project of local celebrity chef-duo, Szabina Szulló and Tamás Széll, and follows the success of Stand25, their highly acclaimed casual restaurant on the Buda side of the city. Here too, their success was almost immediate: accolades quickly poured in, and the restaurant won a Michelin star in 2019, less than a year after opening.

Babel is a Michelin-starred restaurant in the heart of Budapest's downtown offering a classic fine dining experience: the hushed, dimly lit dining room has only a dozen tables, all set with white linen. Babel serves dishes inspired by Transylvania, the chillingly beautiful, mountainous region cradled by the Carpathians and known for its long and complex history (today, it's part of Romania with a sizeable Hungarian community). The proof that this is more than empty marketing slogan is the young head-chef himself, István Veres, a Hungarian native of Transylvania.

In Budapest, Onyx comes closest to offering an old-school, classic European fine dining experience. It's the type of place where crystal chandeliers hang in the opulent dining room and white-glove-wearing waiters scurry about with beautifully sculpted plates in hand. The dishes feature playful textures, rare ingredients, and striking visuals. Onyx, which is located in the heart of Budapest's downtown, is the only two-Michelin-starred restaurant in Hungary currently.

Borkonyha (Winekitchen) is a wildly popular upscale restaurant in Budapest's downtown, serving European fine dining staples and more than two hundred types of Hungarian wines. Head chef Csaba Puskás puts out colorful, almost artistically visual plates made from locally-sourced ingredients.

St. Andrea Wine & Gourmet Bar is an upscale restaurant near Budapest's city center, occupying the ground floor of a luxury office building. Unlike other elite chefs in Budapest who hesitate to put pricey peasant fare in front of discerning diners, St. Andrea's executive chef, Ádám Barna, doesn't shy away from showcasing traditional Hungarian dishes through a fine dining prism.

In the early aughts, Balázs Pethő, the executive chef of family-run Csalogány 26 Restaurant, was a pioneer in improving Hungarian restaurant food. A whole crop of younger cooks, many of them established head chefs now, learned under Pethő's tutelage at a time when comically backward, communist-era practices reigned supreme in Budapest kitchens.

The sleepy outer part of Budapest's District 9 is an unlikely place to boast an upscale French restaurant, so it's against the odds that here hides Petrus, the Bib Gourmand-awarded bistro of owner-chef Zoltán Feke. The dishes fall somewhere between bistro fare and fine dining: the 7-course tasting menu approaches the latter, the a la carte offerings the former.

Textúra is the 2018 venture of the team behind Borkonyha, the decade-old, Michelin-starred restaurant located on the other side of this downtown side street. At Textúra, too, you can experience executive chef Ákos Sárközi's unique brand of technically precise cooking. Rather than packing the menu with updated Hungarian classics as many Budapest fine dining restaurants do, Textúra relegates the local staples to a minor, supporting role (the chicken paprikash, for example, shows up as an unremarkable appetizer).

MÁK Bistro, helmed by 28-year-old head chef János Mizsei, is one of Budapest's leading fine dining restaurants. The fact that Mizsei trained in Denmark and Sweden shines through in the dishes: In line with the New Nordic Cuisine, the plates pack vibrant flavors despite the seemingly everyday ingredients. Mizsei is known to go out of his way to scout for unlikely suppliers; most recently he found a local farmer who collects birch sap in a Hungarian village.

Tucked away on a steep side street in the Castle Hill lies one of Budapest's most expensive, special-occasion restaurants: Arany Kaviár (Golden Caviar). As you'd expect from a place that specializes in high-priced caviars, the exquisite dining rooms, lined with maroon and golden tapestry-like walls and heavy drapes, exude an air of opulence. Apart from fish roe, Arany Kaviár offers two tasting menus—a “Hungarian Fish” and a “Traditional” Russian—and plenty of chilled vodka and premium wines for pairing.

Opened in 1964, Alabárdos is an iconic fine dining restaurant perched on Budapest's Castle Hill, just a stone’s throw away from the imposing Matthias Church. The restaurant is located within a medieval residential home complete with Gothic tracery and ogee curves. The dining room, which has less than a dozen tables, is startlingly impressive: they serve dishes on Herendi porcelain plates set with real silverware.

Thanks to a late Hungarian businessman, Andy Vajna, who had Hollywood connections, Budapest is home to a Nobu, the world’s fanciest chain restaurant (Robert De Niro is an owner). Even more impressively, it's the one and only Nobu in Central Europe with the closest being in Milan. This upscale Japanese-Peruvian restaurant is located inside the five-star Kempinski hotel in Budapest's downtown.

Fausto’s Ristorante, which opened in 1994, is a classic fine dining restaurant in Budapest with a hat-tip to northern Italian fare. Forget pizza and Caprese salad; here scallops, foie gras, flatfish, and venison loin are the lingua franca. A couple of egg pasta and risotto are also available, made with deliciously rich sauces.

Salon is a fine dining restaurant in Budapest inside the historic and jaw-droppingly ornate New York Café, one of the city's top tourist attractions. Salon's seasonal dishes feature the usual suspects of Hungarian fine dining—foie gras, quail, mangalica pork, and venison saddle. Head chef András Wolf is in charge of both the New York Cafe and Salon, but their kitchens are operated separately.

La Perle Noire is a high-end restaurant occupying the ground floor of Mamaison, a four-star hotel on a quiet section of Andrássy Avenue. (Peppered with residential villas and embassies, Budapest's Andrássy Avenue is often compared to the Champs-Élysées.) Let's get the bad news out of the way: the interior of La Perle Noire is anything but cozy or inviting. Dark furnishings lend a constrained formality and nightclub atmosphere to this oversized space.

ESCA is a tiny, 16-seat fine dining restaurant in a quiet backstreet of District 7, Budapest’s party district. The dimly-lit interior, featuring sleek, dark wood finishes and chic, Mid-century modern chairs, couldn’t be more different from the kitsch ruin bars nearby. ESCA is helmed by owner-chef Gábor Fehér, a young local talent who's gained experience in France and Copenhagen before setting up shop here.

KNRDY is an upscale steakhouse in the heart of Budapest’s downtown. The restaurant buys prime-graded and Omaha Angus from the U.S., Wagyu from Australia and Japan, and serves only the best cuts: ribeye/tomahawk, New York strip, filet mignon, and T-bone/porterhouse. If you enjoy the funky flavors of aged meat, KNRDY also offers 50-day dry-aged meats. You can’t really go wrong with anything here—all steaks arrive with a beautifully-browned crust. I enjoyed the intensely flavorful, juicy, and tender Prime Angus ribeye (€60 for 450 grams; 16 oz).

Baraka is popular among well-heeled tourists who rely on TripAdvisor for restaurant recommendations, but there are other fine dining restaurants in Budapest, some even with a Michelin star, that offer better-portioned dishes at more reasonable price point. Baraka’s seasonally-changing menu, prepared by chef André Bicalho, a Brazilian-native, blends French fare with notes of Asian, particularly Japanese flavors.