Trust the research. Since Budapest In Your Pocket went off the radar in 2004 until our return in 2014, the cost of an average meal out in BP has tripled, at least in Hungarian forint. There has also been an astonishing yet concomitant rise in the quality and variety of restaurants. If you know where to look, there are still places you can get a decent meal for 1200 forint. Well, we know where to look and those places are included here, along with all the haute cuisine and fine dining experiences that our collective waistlines would allow. Budapest has two Michelin star holders these days, and for a city of less than 2 million people the choice is quite staggering. These days, you can roam the global palate with, just to give one example, 4 or 5 Vietnamese restaurants to choose from (something that would have seemed like rabid fantasy a decade ago.) There's more sushi than you could shake a chopstick at, inevitably most of it indifferent, and among all the international cuisine, including a solid cluster of good French and Italian kitchens, you'll also find some excellent home grown cooking, meaning usually updates on traditional Hungarian and Hungarian Jewish classics.

You are spoiled for choice. And on top of all that, Hungarian wines are absolutely world class, just not that well known outside Hungary. There are 1000s of restaurants and cafés in Budapest, so while we can't include them all, as a tasty cross section and representative sample, this directory goes deep and wide. Figures in parentheses indicate the approximate price range of main dishes.