Budapest in steam: the city of baths, ruined pubs, and the Danube

It’s a Tuesday morning in February and I’m in a heated indoor pool at the Széchenyi baths, which are over a hundred years old, neo-Baroque, the colour of canary-yellow custard, and currently steaming softly in the eight-degree air outside. Two Hungarian men, in their sixties, are playing chess at a floating chessboard between two of the outdoor pools. They have been playing this same game, more or less, for thirty years. Steam rises off the water; the city beyond is grey and quiet; the chess players are silent.

Why I keep coming back

Budapest is the European capital that has felt to me, more than any other, structurally distinct. It is one of the only cities in the world built on a thermal-spring aquifer that delivers naturally heated water — over 30°C in some sources — to public baths in operation since Roman times. The bathhouse culture is not a tourist attraction. It is the city’s primary form of slow social life. People meet at the baths, they take meetings at the baths, they read newspapers at the baths.

The city is also visually unique. Pest is flat, on the east bank, with the wide Habsburg avenues, the apartment blocks with their inner courtyards, the Art Nouveau decadence of the early 1900s. Buda is hilly, on the west, with the castle district, the medieval streets, and the residential quietness. The Danube cuts between them, and the seven bridges across it are each a different shape and era — the Chain Bridge is the postcard one, the Liberty Bridge the locals’.

Where to base yourself

District V (Belváros) is the central, walkable core; convenient but tourist-priced.

District VII (Erzsébetváros) is the historic Jewish quarter and now the central nightlife district; ruin pubs, restaurants, lively. Choose a quieter street.

District VIII (around Mátyás tér) or District XI (Buda side, around Móricz Zsigmond körtér) for a more local, residential feel.

What to actually do

Visit at least two baths. The two essentials: Széchenyi (Pest side, Városliget park) — the famous outdoor Baroque-yellow complex, best in winter when the steam is at its most dramatic. Gellért (Buda side, in the Gellért Hotel building) — Art Nouveau interiors, tiled, the most beautiful indoor bath in the city. Rudas is the third option — a 16th-century Ottoman bathhouse, the original octagonal Turkish dome, atmospheric and small.

Walk Andrássy Avenue from the centre to Heroes’ Square. Budapest’s grand boulevard, 2.5 km, lined with mansions and the Opera House. The metro line 1 (M1, the yellow line) runs under it — opened in 1896, the oldest metro on the European continent; ride one stop just for the small wooden carriages.

Spend a long evening in the ruin pubs. Szimpla Kert is the famous and now slightly touristed original, in a half-demolished pre-war apartment block, with mismatched furniture and surreal junk-shop décor. Mazel Tov is the more upmarket cousin. Anker’t is a quieter local option. The ruin pub is a Budapest invention from the early 2000s and remains one of the city’s signature institutions.

Take a day trip to Szentendre. A small Baroque town on the Danube 30 minutes north by HÉV suburban train. Riverside, Serbian-orthodox church-heavy, artists’ colony in the 20th century. A half-day. Lunch at Kreinbacher.

Go to the Opera or a concert. The Hungarian State Opera reopened after a long renovation; tickets are extraordinarily inexpensive by Western standards (€20–40 for excellent seats). The Liszt Academy chamber concerts in the evening are some of the best small-format music in central Europe.

Where to eat

Hungarian cooking has been undergoing a slow revival from the heavy paprika-and-cream-and-sour-cream stereotype.

Borkonyha (Wine Kitchen, centre) — One Michelin star, contemporary Hungarian, an excellent wine list focused on Hungarian regions.

Stand — Two Michelin, the formal contemporary Hungarian.

Kispiac Bisztró — Old-school neighbourhood, the halászlé (paprika fish soup) and the goose-leg with red cabbage.

Frici Papa — Cafeteria-style, cheap, the kind of place office workers eat. The gulyás is the cup-of-soup classic.

Karaván in the Erzsébetváros for street food — the lángos (deep-fried flat bread topped with sour cream and cheese), the kürtőskalács (chimney cake).

A New York Café for the absurd, gilded turn-of-the-century coffeehouse experience. It’s a tourist set piece and expensive, but it is also one of the most extravagantly decorated rooms in Europe.

When to come

Late September to early November is the perfect window: pleasant temperatures, the city in autumn light, the baths comfortable.

January through early March is the steam-and-paprika season: cold above, hot in the water, the city at its most atmospheric.

July and August are very hot and crowded; the baths are uncomfortable in summer’s worst heat.

Practical notes

• Visa: Schengen.
• Money: Hungarian forint. Card increasingly accepted; carry cash for the smaller restaurants. Hungary is the cheapest of the central European capitals.
• Transport: The Metro (4 lines), trams (24 lines), and buses are excellent. A 24-hour ticket is around 2,500 HUF.
• The baths: Bring a swimsuit, flip-flops, and a small towel; rentals are available. The cabin (private changing) costs slightly more than the locker; worth it.
• Language: Hungarian, unrelated to most European languages; English is widely spoken in tourism, less so in older bars. A few words go a long way.
• Wine: Hungary has serious wine regions — Tokaj for the sweet wines and increasingly the dry ones, Eger for the Bull’s Blood reds, Villány and Szekszárd for ambitious reds.

A final thought

Budapest, after twenty years of visits, remains my favourite European capital for a long winter weekend. The combination of architectural grandeur (a city built to be twice the size it now is, by an empire that no longer exists), serious thermal-bath culture, lively nightlife, and prices still half those of Western Europe is rare and increasingly precious. The city has the slightly melancholy quality of a place that was, between 1867 and 1914, one of the great capitals of Europe; an empire’s worth of public buildings was built in that fifty-year span; and the city has been adjusting to its smaller, post-imperial role ever since.

The chess players at Széchenyi are part of this story. The slow Tuesday morning, the old men in the steam, the unhurried inheritance of a daily ritual — this is what Budapest gets right. The city has not given up on its accumulated public pleasures. The baths are still here. The opera is still here. The ruin pubs, an early-2000s reinvention, have become a new accumulated public pleasure. Come for at least four days. Visit two baths. Drink Tokaji at sunset on the riverside. Walk back across the Liberty Bridge in the dark. The empire is gone but the architecture, and the steam, remain.