Centrál Kávéház: Literature over Coffee since 1887
Why is it significant?
Look through the huge plate-glass windows on Károlyi utca: marble-topped tables, bentwood chairs, a high ceiling, waiters moving between the rows with silver trays. This is the Centrál, opened in 1887, and if you want to understand the Budapest coffee house, this is a good place to sit down.
Key Facts
| Place | Centrál Kávéház: Literature over Coffee since 1887 |
|---|---|
| Address | Károlyi utca 9, 1053 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.49200, 19.05670 |
| Part of Walk | Coffee, Cake & Paprika: A Budapest Food Walk from Gerbeaud to the Great Market Hall |
| Generated | Generated |
Look through the huge plate-glass windows on Károlyi utca: marble-topped tables, bentwood chairs, a high ceiling, waiters moving between the rows with silver trays. This is the Centrál, opened in 1887, and if you want to understand the Budapest coffee house, this is a good place to sit down.
Around 1900 Budapest had several hundred coffee houses, and many people practically lived in them. A coffee bought you a table for the day, heating in winter, the morning and evening papers on wooden holders, often from half of Europe, and in many places pen, ink and paper, free of charge. Writers wrote there, lawyers met clients there, and bachelors with cold rented rooms simply spent their evenings there.
The Centrál was one of the most literary of them all. Its regulars included writers and editors connected to Nyugat, West, the great Hungarian literary magazine founded in 1908, which shaped a whole generation of poets and novelists. Manuscripts were read, rejected and rewritten at these tables, and reputations were made and broken between two cups of coffee.
Then history closed the doors. After the communist takeover, private cafés were nationalised and the old coffee house world, with its idle talk and foreign newspapers, was seen as suspicious and bourgeois. The Centrál closed in 1949, and for decades the space served other purposes. It reopened as a coffee house only in 2000, carefully restored to look as if it had never been away.
Order a coffee here, and you are doing something oddly political: sitting still, reading, talking, taking your time, exactly the habits that the coffee house once protected. When you are ready, walk east along Kossuth Lajos utca. On the corner of Szép utca, look out for a plaque on the wall; then carry on to the big crossroads at the Astoria hotel.