Kőleves Restaurant

Kőleves is a popular restaurant in the heart of Budapest’s old Jewish Quarter, inside an 1851 building once home to a kosher meat processing facility and butcher shop. Leftover objects are used as design pieces, including a leather-bound ledger book and a weathered Talmud. Kőleves pays homage to the building’s with a few Jewish-Hungarian dishes, such as a matzo ball soup and cholent, the typical Sabbath bean stew.

As other busy and tourist-heavy restaurants, Kőleves aims to please all tastes with a hybrid menu. Hungarian bean goulash, roast duck, ribeye steak, and a New York cheesecake appear side-by-side on the menu. Almost all dishes are reliably good, if not memorable. More locals appear for the lunchtime two-course prix fixe. In the summer, the backyard of Kőleves, Kőleves Kert, transforms into an all-welcoming outdoor bar.