Simply awful – St George Restaurant, 44 Franceza Street, Lipscani

I have just had the worst meal of the year. Everything is wrong about the Hungarian St George Restaurant from the moment you walk in. The décor is pure 1950s communist. They have tried to make it look rustic, but it is dull and miserable instead. Dark brown terracotta floor tiles, dark wooden furniture with old outdated cheap wooden chairs, dark green-ish walls and tomb-like arches.

Even the clientele were ‘wrong’. In the heart of Lipscani, an area famous for its happy, vibrant, youthful crowds, the St George customers were uniformly as dull and as seriously miserable as the restaurant.

It was almost as if they were inadvertently adhering to the theme of the restaurant by wearing 1950s style, outdated, dowdy clothing. Daughters dressed like their mothers and mothers dressed like grandmothers. If there was such a thing as ‘style police’ they would all be arrested for crimes against fashion!

The only nice touch was their serving beer in big ceramic jugs. One look at the menu and it was obvious they were using nothing more than locally supplied Romanian produce which could be bought here in any supermarket. But they did put a Hungarian spin on it, which was hardly difficult as modern Hungarian cuisine is based upon: pork lard, red onion peppers and paprika. Well, that’s not much to say for a national cuisine!

Sadly the sophistication of the Hapsburg era is confined to history – a time when Hungarians dined on fine French cuisine. But the communists forced an austere but varied diet on the country which they readily embraced and it exists to this very day.

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Hungarian travel literature all states that Hungarian food is the spiciest in Europe, which is absolute nonsense. There is a dependence upon a selection of: garlic, bay, peppercorns, dill, thyme, mustard, tarragon and cinnamon, all invariably thrown into a pot and boiled. I cannot think of a more uncohesive and mismatched blend of spices which, when mixed together, will spell disaster to the sophisticated Western palate.

But let’s eat. Whilst choosing from the menu we were interrupted by the ubiquitous, tourist tacky Hungarian ‘band’ of a double bass, sqweezebox and violin. There can be nothing more intrusive than looking under the armpit of a fiddler standing over your table. I shooed them away.

Soup is an essential part of any Hungarian meal. I was looking in vain for their ‘Halaszle’ (fish soup) but they had none, and ‘Borlev’ (wine soup) but they didn’t have that either. Instead they offered mushroom, chicken, cheese and pickled cabbage soups. The only ethnically authentic soup on offer was chilled cherry soup.

But they did have that ghastly tourist staple ‘goulash’. It should be renamed ‘GOULAG’ because throughout Hungary anything can be put into this watery stew. Anything whatsoever as long as it includes a minimum of a few cubes of meat and lashings of paprika. Ours was awful.

We followed with grilled Camembert, which I assume was not made in Hungary! It was two discs of breaded, cheap, tasteless Camembert which refused to melt and came straight out of a local supermarket freezer. Away to meat, so we looked at the salads.

Hungarian salads are noted for their simplicity. They always accompany meat and consist of only tomato, cucumber and onion. But just to remind you that this is Romania not Hungary, the House offers Caesar, or chicken, or tuna salads. Hardly Hungarian!

Even the House’s fish dishes were standard Romanian fare of trout, pike, salmon or dorada.

Again they had standard Romanian dishes of chicken grilled with Feta cheese, or with vegetables or with Roquefort or with mushrooms. No thanks, I was neither interested nor excited. Their beef and pork dishes may well have been given Hungarian names, but they were nothing different from anything you would find on a Romanian menu. But with two exceptions which we ordered.

So just looking for something authentic, we bravely stepped up to the plate and ordered ‘pork with spicy pig brains’. It was ghastly. A roulade of dried out pork stuffed with something crispy and all over cooked by means of deep frying. A total failure. Likewise we had a ‘beef Budapest’ which was an unidentifiable cut of beef (resplendent with unwanted gristle) together with a limp, over fried mishmash of soggy vegetables all ceremoniously and carelessly dumped on top of the awful meat with the whole mess drowning in oil.

We looked for pancakes which are served as a main course in Hungary. But not here. We looked for famous Hungarian salamis (the only decent food in Hungary) such as their fabulous ‘Hurka’ which comes in two varieties, either as a liver sausage or as a black pudding (boudin noire) but naturally the House didn’t bother to import them.

We left virtually all our food uneaten. But not one person, neither the waiter nor kitchen staff, enquired as to why we did so.

The forgettable St George is in Franceza St, in between the wonderful Bon Bouch and Divan restaurants. Given that level of competition, it beggars belief that anybody would chose to dine in St George.

Michael Barclay

mab.media@dnt.ro