Thursday, October 23, 2025
The Kádár Étkezde: Good food for Bad Jews.
Thursday, August 28, 2025
Subotica, Serbia: Train to Nowhere
No summer is complete without a jaunt south to the Balkan lands! After a few months at home in Budapest's 7th district - the underage tourist drinking capital of Europe - a trip to the Balkans, even just to cross the border, is a tonic, a breath of fresh air. There is an electricity simply to being in the Balkans. Central Europe - as Hungary likes to style itself - combines the dour moralism of Protestant Europe with an East European "how many of us does it take to change a light bulb?" approach to technology. The Balkans - and I am specifically addressing Serbia in the post - is like crossing into a strange mirror world, where light bulbs are a privilege, not a right. The Balkans wear its traditions on its sleeve. Budapest is so modern, so European, so... expensive. So: cross the border, easily marked by a razor wire fence erected in 2015 when Viktor Orban was gleefully making a name as the Troll King protecting white Christian Europe from the brown hordes of refugees from the Middle East.
Subotica (Szabadka in Hungarian) just next to the Hungarian border, is the main city of the Bacska region of the Vojvodina, the northern province of Serbia that was a multi-ethnic autonomous region of old Yugoslavia. Although Serbs comprise the majority in the province, in many places the ethnic mix - even after the Yugoslav civil wars of the 1990s - remains a diverse cultural patchwork of languages and local traditions that seems to have forged a tolerance that evades many other regions of Eastern Europe. Subotica is nearly half Hungarian, with a large minority of Bunyevac, a Catholic Croatian sub group that has native to the region long enough to claim its dialect as a separate language in the municipality
By chance, we arrived during the weekend of the Bunyevac harvest festival, Duzijanca. Every evening crowds would gather near the central square to listen to tamburica bands and marvel at the hay sculptures. Folk dance groups from the villages showed up, and people contentedly traipsed up dawn the streets chatting and visiting, the classic Balkan corso, the evening social stroll.
I can only take so much tamburica music, an aversion dating to my days playing in Balkan bands in the USA (I prefer funkier, less harmonious music, as in gaida!) On Saturday, at least, Serbian Gypsy Brass bands gathered outside the City hall to rent themselves out to wedding parties.
The City Hall itself is worth seeing: tours are given daily by showing up exactly at noon at the main entrance. Subotica was once one of the most important cities in the Kingdom of Hungary, a role that shrank after the region was made part of Serbia after World War One. Just before the first World War Hungary - of which Subotica was then a part - had gulled itself into believing in a glorious, pan-Danubian Hapsburg future, and grand architectural statements like the Budapest Parliament and the Subotica City Hall are testaments to the dashed dreams of that briefly optimistic era.
During Subotica's glory days local architects built dozens of gob-smackingly beautiful Art Nouveau palaces and city buildings. During the communist era a lot of these were demolished to modernize the city center, but the remaining ones define the look of Subotica.
Subotica, indeed, the entire Vojvodina, was once home to a large Jewish community, who were apparently doing rather well from trade at the end of the 19th century. The Subotica Synagogue, built in 1908 is without a doubt the most gorgeous shul I have ever been in, and I have been in a lot them.
Designed by two local architects, Dezső Jakab and Marcell Komor, who idolized the Budapest Jewish architect Liport Baumhorn. They applied their taste to the City Hall office and many other local buildings as well. And then came the First World War, the Hapsburg defeat, and the Trianon treaty. Little did they realize at the time that the busy mercantile center of Subotica would soon become a dusty border town, albeit with some spectacular buildings.
The Synagogue alone is worth the trip to Subotica, even if you are not Jewish. The motifs reflect the Hungarian Neolog Jewish sentiment of the late 1800s: an embrace of Hungarian cultural identity al0ngside Jewish religion following the German Reform model. The stained glass work alone is astounding. Motifs from Hungarian folk design adorn the ceilings (alongside some decidedly Bunyevac designs as well, probably not by licit intention of the artists) The real reason we went to Subotica is to eat. On Fumie's birthday we were thinking of going to one of the few places in Budapest still serving cevapcici... and we realized that we could take a train to Subotica, stay over night, and eat cevapi for about the same price as dining out in Budapest. So we did.If you like meat, you will like Serbia. Cevapi, cevapcici, meatwads, call them what you will, they are good down in Serbia. They are even better in Bosnia, but the Vojvodina became home to thousands of Bosnian Serb refugess after the Bosnian War in the 1990s (replacing about 60,000 local Croats, but not the Bunyevac... its complicated....) and bringing the Bosnian obsession with little tubes of grilled meat with them.
The Flea Market is the main draw for visitors to Subotica. Buses loaded with Hungarians cross the border every weekend to load up on canned tuna fish, laundry soap, toilet paper, and tool sets, all at prices well below what they would pay in Hungary. Most of the market sellers are, or at least can speak Hungarian, and accept Hungarian Forints in payment.
There is the usual cheap Chinese clothing section, a food section, an area selling tools, farm implements, and bicycles, a classic shit-for-sale junk and antique market, and also a fresh vegetable market. Of course, we were there ion the second hottest day of the summer, so I couldn't fully appreciate the garbage laid out for my perusal in comfort. I didn't even have the appetite to sample the pleskavica stands that are scattered throughout the market. Pleskavica is Serbia's answer to the hamburger. Basically, it is cevap meat in a burger shape, but better, and you get to choose the toppings, which is also better. Just before we began our trip back to Budapest, we visited the main vegetable and food market in downtown Subotica, which is open on Sunday until noon (the train leaves at 1pm) We stocked up on natural garlic, prunes, almonds and some vegetables at prices about one quarter what we pay in Budapest. We bought four ear of sweet corn for about a 80 US cents: in Budapest corn goes for over a dollar an ear these days. Boiled up that night at home, it was absolutely the sweetest corn I have ever tasted. Walking past the fish seller Fumie noticed they were selling fully roasted red scorpion fish, the Adriatic scarpina that goes for top prices in Dalmatian restaurants. For the equivalent of four euros she got a whole roasted fish, stashed it in the freezer bag she carries with her everywhere, and we set out for home, which should have been a three hour train journey.
Finally, an old local train was pressed into duty to get us back to Budapest, on which we were grateful to have even found seats. With the heat around 100 Fahrenheit, only open windows provided moving, if hot, air. I am glad we got back to our flat with any sanity (thanks goes to my sister, who got us an air conditioner for the flat this year!) And the most surprising bit of the story: the fish survived the journey'
Thursday, July 10, 2025
Istanbul's Inflated Economy
Istanbullites eat out a lot, and they have ever since it was Byzantium. Its a big city and people can't go home for lunch. People pick up a bite for breakfast on the way to work, and tradesmen's cafes - called Esnaf Lokanta - serve cheap, filling lunches during the day. Snacking is considered a basic right to all Turks, but that döner kebab that was a dollar back in 2006 can now hit eight dollars and up, while the average Turkish wage is basically the same as it was years ago. If you read history, going all the way back to the Byzantines, Istanbul has always been a poster child for urban economic problems. Istanbullites are tough and cynical about it. Hell, they survived the Fourth Crusade, they can survive this.
The resulting economic turmoil led Turkey to an 83% inflation rate in 2022, which hit Turks where it hurts: in the stomach. Today the inflation rate still stands at around 35%. Given the government controls on free press (there are a lot of Turkish journalists in prison)the Turkish general populace takes to social media to express itself. My Instagram feed is full of examples of Turkish meat porn, a wide ranging genre featuring smiling Anatolian chefs offering mounds of steaming, juicy sliced meat to the camera lens. Some of my favorite Turkish cooking videos are the ones where big muscled guys with moustaches work up a few kilos of lamb in the back room of a butcher shop, grill up the results and stand around tasting the results like satisfied wine experts discussing a vintage. And people can express themselves freely about the price of food.
What I have noticed is that more and more Turkish food videos are focused on cheaper foods that can be had in local grocery stores: grilled cheese sandwiches, chick peas wrapped in flatbread, foods sold from street carts like the ubiquitous chicken, chickpea and rice or gözelme pancakes. Comments on the clips are largely shock about prices, especially for common lunch items like köfte kebab and döner. Meat has gotten pricey. A downtown döner kebab lunch can be as much as a full service pit roast lamb dinner in the Kadinlar Pazar. Carefully choosing can keep costs down.
For a tourist, Istanbul can still be negotiated on a budget. We no longer choose to stay near the downtown. We took advantage of the Turkish Airlines stopover program, which offers a night free in a five star hotel if your flight connects in Istanbul - two nights if you a flying from a long distance (like the USA). We added two extra nights to that by contacting the hotel directly, and got a 50% reduced rate for two extra nights. Our neighborhood - Bakirköy on the sea just outside the old city walls - was a normal part of Istanbul. No tourists, a few universities, a busy shopping district, malls, mosques, and a stop on the new Marmaray train line to downtown Istanbul.
As you wander north of the Marmaray rail station towards Incirli you hit the Bakirkoy Market on Thursday and Saturdays. Municipal Bazaars like this operate all over Istanbul on different days of the week: this is how Istanbullites deal with the economy. Home goods, clothing, second hand tools, its all here for a song. Crowds gobble down gözelme Anatolian pancakes stuffed with meat, spinach, or cheese, made in front of you by real Turkish grandmas for 70 Turkish lira (about 1ドル.75) Among the things that followed us home was an entirely affordable modern Afghan kilim rug. A similar piece downtown cost 100% more.
The nearby neighborhoods of Incirli and Gungören are known locally as "Little Gaziantep" - home to a Anatolian internal immigrants from the Gaziantep region in southern part of Turkey, a region known for its uncompromising traditional cuisine. Yes, we took advantage. Antep cooking is militantly conservative: bread must be fresh, kebabs must be just so, and dessert must be like grandma used to make.
For our first night in Bakirköy, after a ten hour flight and an hour taxi ride from Istanbul Airport, we already knew where we were having dinner: Çevre İskender Kebap Lahmacun Salon a small all night kebab place a few blocks away from our hotel. We have been there before. Pure Gaziantep style kebab, with a big wooden oven churning out fresh lavash bread and lahmacun to order. Fumie had the classic ground meat Adana kebab, I had kanatler - simple grilled wings, crunchy and perfectly finished by one of those moustached meat masters of southern Turkey. The night before we left we returned for another Antep specialty that I have been wanting to try for years: katmer .
Katmer is a thin, flakey baklava pastry folded around a pistachio and vanilla cream filling, served hot from the oven. I don't usually eat sweets but there is a first time for everything and this was our final stop before returning to Budapest. We also found a local festival of regional foods near the Marmaray train staion: producers from all over Turkey were handing out samples and selling both fresh traditinal and cooked foods. We stopped and shared a cağ kebab - a specialty of Erzurum in Eastern Turkey, the horizontal ancestor of the modern vertical spit döner.
Wednesday, July 02, 2025
New York New Jersey New World
We're heading home. It's been a relatively short trip back to the family homestead in New Jersey, a full four miles outside of New York City, just a Spanish bus ride down Route 4 away. We didn't go into the city very much this time. The main purpose was to be here for my Dad's 99th birthday.
Jack Cohen, US Navy veteran and retired Gold Shield New York City Police department detective is still sharp and fully operating at 100%. He is a bit shaky walking long distances and his career as a dancer of 1950s mambo and chacha are definitely over, but he still gets out to the Jersey meadowlands almost daily to go bird watching, which is a unique hobby for a former NYPD detective. He doesn't mess with the finches and sparrows much. He watches eagles and Ospreys, the big birds.
There are two things I miss about New York that I can't find in Europe: decent Cantonese Chinese food and Jewish style pastrami. Most of the "authentic Chinese" food we get in Hungary is straight out Beijing: dumplings, dumplings, and dumplings. For pastrami I have actually made it myself, which is messy and a ridiculous effort. Other than that Manhattan has changed so much since 9/11 that I don't have much use for it anymore. Gone are the quirky bookshops, the record stores, the oddball ethnic percussion shops, replaced by chain department stores selling sneakers to teenagers and Gucci to the luxury class.
For Jewish deli food, there are fewer and fewer real Jewish delis left. Liebman's in the Bronx, Pastrami Queen, and notable Pastrami master Freddie Loesser of the legendary and excellent (and closed) Loesser's Deli in the Bronx just passed away this month. Katz's Deli, which I have written about many times, has become a major New York tourist destination, with long waiting lines (people say to go late at night if you don't like lines) The pastrami sandwich at Katz's is now 32ドル.00, which sounds like a lot but it is the best in the world (alongside Schwartz' Smoked Meat in Montreal) and 32 bucks generally won't get you far in New York anyways. We opted to stay in Jersey, and went to the Pastrami Grill Bistro in Garfield.
Where I am a hardboiled pastrami guy, Fumie loves beef with a pure beefy flavor, so she ordered the brisket sandwich. It was fourteen dollars. Less than half the New York price these days. It was fantastic. Same texture and consistency as the corned beef and pastrami but without the spicing. I may become a fan of brisket sandwiches in the future. They are certainly easier to make in home recipe version than pastrami, although finding the right cut of beef in Hungary is going to require negotiation with a butcher. Butcher cuts in Hungary are entirely different from those in the USA.
I have nothing against taking the 7 train all the way to Flushing for New York's widest selection of regional Chinese food, but for Cantonese food Manhattan's Chinatown still rules. In my younger days I used to underwrite trips to the city by economizing on food: I ate almost exclusively Hong Kong style wonton noodle soups, which used to be the cheap option for a meat and soup dinner under five dollars. Today that has doubled. A lot of the cheap noodle soup and congee places that used to sell chopped Cantonese BBQ meats have disappeared along with the sweatshop clothing industry that supported them until recently.
In their place a new generation of wonton noodle soup houses have opened up. I had read about Maxi's Noodle, which specializes in the old Hong Kong style noodle soups. They used to be one of the only Cantonese places in Flushing. The daughter of the original owner took it over and made a hip atmosphere and preserved the family tradition of making some of the largest shrimp and meat wontons in the city. I had to go. Fantastic, and worth the price.
