During our short stay in Budapest before heading on to Debrecen, we decided to have lunch at the restaurant of The Ritz-Carlton, the hotel we were staying in for the night, which offered a new concept in Italian dining.
As a reminder, here is the itinerary followed:
The concept
The concept is simple: it’s a good-quality Italian restaurant, which normally has a large dining room behind the hotel lobby, and in summer, the outlet has a terrace, which is where we chose to have lunch.
The setting
The setting was quite pleasant, and the mild late spring weather in Budapest meant that we could take advantage of the sunshine to have lunch on the terrace.
The menu
The menu was quite interesting, offering quality antipasti and pasta dishes as well as grilled meats and fish.
The meal and the dishes
For the main course, I chose the vittello tonnato, which was absolutely excellent, the tuna cream was perfect, the veal carpaccio thick enough to be chewy on the palate, and the capers in reasonable quantity ensured the dish’s balance.
For dessert, I chose a chocolate entremets which was excellent, but which I couldn’t finish. The accompanying ice cream was absolutely perfect.
The service
This was the black spot of our lunch: the service. Everything took an extremely long time, from setting the table to bringing the menu, then taking the order, then serving the dishes and finally the bill, which took forever to arrive. It’s not normal for a lunch to take more than 1h30. A lunch should be able to be served in 45 minutes, otherwise you wouldn’t attract the local office clientele. Urgent attention to detail.
The atmosphere
The atmosphere was pleasant, but that’s more down to the sun than the service.
Bottom line
The execution of the service does a disservice to the efforts and quality of the cuisine. Too bad!
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