The 19 Best Fine Dining Restaurants In Budapest

Babel is a Michelin-starred restaurant in the heart of Budapest's downtown offering a memorable fine dining experience. The hushed, dim, comfortably elegant dining room has only a dozen tables, all set with white linen. The oversized windows overlook the neighboring Gothic cathedral, bathed in soft light.

You wouldn't guess that a truly excellent fine dining restaurant hides in a dim backstreet of Budapest's District 7, just blocks from the heart of the party district. The vibes here are casually elegant: cushy modern furnishings, sleek open kitchen, bare wooden tables, soft electronic music. Head chef Ádám Mede's below-ground kitchen sends out beautiful plates that are inspired by Japanese and Hungarian cuisine. Smoked trout on a bed of sushi rice; sturgeon filets in a mirin and yuzu-slicked sauce; ramen with homemade noodles and strips of Mangalica; catfish, in a paprikash sauce reduced to earthy richness.

In 2010, Costes Ráday was the first restaurant in Hungary to earn a Michelin star and the establishment still carries a special cachet. The exquisite six-course tasting menu of head-chef Levente Koppány is inspired from near and far and includes a couple of memorable dishes. One of them is the slices of celery root molded in the shape of a ravioli and filled with a flavorful spread of stracciatella cheese and smoked eggplant. Each crunchy bite calls for another. Also delicious is the bite of beef tongue with a flavor-rich side of sliced pear, creamy parnsip, and hazelnuts with a savory Hungarian kadarka (if you opt in for the wine pairing), and the tender venison loin with earthy beets.

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.

Budapest’s latest Michelin-starred restaurant, Essência is the project of the Portuguese-Hungarian husband and wife duo, Tiago and Éva Sabarigo. Before venturing out on their own, Tiago was head chef at another decorated establishment, Costes Downtown, while Éva came from the hospitality industry. Essência is a casual fine dining restaurant: the high-ceilinged ground floor features exposed brick walls, plush mid-century modern furniture, and bare tables.

If you think the decades-old food trend of all things pickled and fermented and foraged has run its course, think again. Currently, one of the most popular restaurants among Hungarian diners is Salt, a downtown establishment which wouldn't be wrong to call the "Noma of Budapest" as it seems to have adopted much from the playbook of the famous Copenhagen restaurant which pioneered the genre. In 2021, Salt earned a star from Michelin.

Könyvbár is a snug, upscale-ish restaurant within Budapest's Jewish Quarter. The food doesn't easily fit into any mold: there are both Hungarian (goulash soup) and international classics (risotto with scallops) on the slim menu, which changes seasonally. What unites these beautifully plated dishes is how good they are. Take the fogas, once Hungary's prized fish, arriving on a bed of creamy cauliflower and ringed by crunchy and colorful slices of the vegetable.

MÁK Bistro is a fine dining restaurant in Budapest finding inspiration in the New Nordic cuisine. Accordingly, head chef János Mizsei, who trained in Denmark and Sweden, serves up bright-tasting flavors from seemingly everyday ingredients. Mizsei is known to go out of his way to scout for unlikely suppliers, like a farmer who collects birch sap in a Hungarian village. The dishes are heavy on vegetables and fish, both of them prepared in light sauces. The interior shows obvious Scandinavian inspirations: the bare, exposed brick dining rooms have sleek wooden tables stripped of tableclothes.

Located in the heart of downtown Budapest, Textúra is the sister restaurant of Borkonyha, the Michelin-decorated establishment across the street from it. At Textúra, too, you can experience executive chef Ákos Sárközi's brand of technically precise cooking. Rather than piling the menu with updated Hungarian classics as many Budapest fine dining restaurants do, Textúra relegates the local staples to a supporting role. How come? Sárközy is a Hungarian celebrity chef and many of the customers here consist of his fans, for whom faraway dishes hold more appeal than yet another bowl of goulash, no matter how good it is.

St. Andrea is an upscale restaurant near Budapest's city center, occupying the ground floor of a luxury office building. They don't don't shy away from showcasing classic Hungarian dishes through a fine dining prism, for example the 6-course "traditional innovation" tasting menu features stuffed cabbage with mangalica pork, a stew of tender beef paired with egg dumplings (pörkölt), and lecsó, a beloved Hungarian-Serbian summer dish packing ripe summer vegetables and crisped-up sausages. The 6-course tasting menu runs €60 per person, or €110 with wine pairing. St. Andrea's waitstaff is kind and informed—they're one of the best service teams in Budapest.

The sleepy outer part of Budapest's District 9 is an unlikely place for an upscale French restaurant so it's against the odds that here hides Petrus, the Bib Gourmand-awarded bistro of Hungarian owner-chef Zoltán Feke. You might think that the vintage Citroën car parked inside the restaurant overdoes the French countryside vibes but the snug space is comfortably elegant. Petrus's slim menu features both classic French bistro food — onion soup, baked camambert and the like — and fine dining fare. The tasting menu skews to the latter, the a la carte offerings the former.

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

Thanks to a late Hungarian businessman, Andy Vajna, with top Hollywood connections, Budapest is home to a Nobu, the world’s fanciest chain restaurant (Robert De Niro is an owner of the parent company). This upscale Japanese-Peruvian establishment is located inside the dim ground floor of the five-star Kempinski hotel smack in the middle of 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 gastronomic currency. A couple of egg pasta and risotto are also available, made with deliciously rich sauces. The decor is traditional fine dining: soft background music drifts from the background of the dim dining room, which has only a dozen tables, all set with heavy linen tablecloths. Under the vigilant eyes of owner Fausto Di Vora, always dressed in a chef's coat, an army of waiters quietly scurry around the tables that tend to fill up on Friday and Saturday evenings with well-heeled tourists and local businesspeople.

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: La Perle Noire's interior is anything but cozy — rows of dark furnishings lend a constrained formality to this oversized space. The good news? There's a green terrace overlooking Andrássy to escape the inside and offering an exclusive dining experience in the warmer months.