§ Issues
20
Dispatches filed and counting — for the line, not the lounge.
Freshly grilled
File · game
4 Nov 2026 · 3 min read
Autumn in CEE: Bakery money, restaurant farewells and Vienna’s wild boar.
Budapest bakeries attract investors as restaurants close, Vienna sells its own wild boar, and Romanian regions bet on food tourism.
¶ Pull quotes
From this issue →
The line, in their words.
Latest dispatches
Pull · § 01
Autumn in CEE: Bakery money, restaurant farewells and Vienna’s wild boar.
→ game
Pull · § 02
What it's like to get 10,000 people to dine out in a single week
→ bucharest
Pull · § 03
The soundtrack to a $60 loaf of bread
→ pricing
Budapest: one wedding and four funerals
Not everyone in Budapest's hospitality scene is celebrating this autumn. While one of the city's best-known bakeries is preparing for an ambitious new chapter, four restaurants have recently said goodbye, each for a very different reason.
The Wedding: One of Budapest's best-known (and supposedly most expensive) premium bakeries, Vaj, currently operating at three locations across the city, has welcomed new investors, with two of its three founders exiting and co-founder Kristóf Markó retaining a one-third stake. With annual revenue of around HUF 1.9 billion (€4.8 million), the new owners are planning additional locations, new formats and 50% revenue growth in 2027. Not a bad marriage proposal.
Funeral No. 1: Tranzit by Flow - veganism wasn't enough. Housed in a former bus station transformed into a striking hospitality space, Tranzit by Flow had a setting as distinctive as its plant-based menu. But after eight years of building the Flow brand and just 18 months at its latest location, the bistro closed in October. The owners say they simply couldn't build a large enough base of regular customers. A reminder that even a great location and an interesting concept don't necessarily translate into a sustainable business.
Funeral No. 2: Hippeace - the end of the vegetable stew bar. Hungarian food personality Ferenc Szatmári, better known as Főzelékes Feri, closed his tiny Klauzál Square restaurant after three years. The concept revolved around főzelék, Hungary's traditional thick vegetable stews - or, as an American expat once described them to me, "adult baby food”. Szatmári is returning to the media business, leaving behind an interesting question: can a famous food personality turn a very specific everyday dish into a lasting restaurant concept?
Funeral No. 3: Bereg Embassy - trouble with the neighbours. After 11 years, the popular Buda café and bar closed in October. According to its owners, a prolonged dispute with the building's residential community made continuing impossible. Sometimes the biggest threat to a restaurant isn't competition, food costs or a shortage of guests. It's the neighbours upstairs.
Funeral No. 4: Vietnámi Gulyás - a chef's farewell, for now. Chef Krisztián Huszár's distinctive Hungarian-Asian restaurant closed its Frankel Leó Street location. Known for its unconventional fusion of Hungarian flavours and Asian techniques, the restaurant had developed a loyal following. The team has hinted at a possible return, so this may be more of a goodbye to the location than to the concept itself.
Vienna is now selling its own wild boar
From Vienna, there are two things to report, strangely related (Alexei here). First, a fox trotted past my building the other night, cool as you like. I live in the central 8th district and, while I had seen foxes further out, this was a first so close to home. As I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, the fox was followed by a weasel. He gave me a very casual look. I wonder where they were off to.
The reason I’m telling you this is because since 2022, Vienna has run its municipal food brand, Wiener Gusto – arguably the only European capital to do so. It sells flour, lentils and honey – all made from ingredients grown within the city limits. But it also offers game meat. Obviously, foxes and weasels are spared, but how about venison steaks, anyone?
The range is seasonal, and if you are partial to game, wild boar mince has just come in.
Delivery is currently limited to Austria, and Wiener Gusto products are available at select supermarkets in Vienna. Now of course Vienna is unusually well endowed with open space, with around 50 percent of its territory made up of parks, woods and farmland. But surely other cities have areas suitable for agriculture too. Should they follow Vienna’s lead?
Romania: Three European Gastronomic Regions in the Following Three Years
Harghita, Banat and Dobruja, three regions in Romania, have (or are trying to) become European Gastronomic Regions: Harghita in 2027, Banat in 2028 and Dobruja is a candidate for 2029 and it will find out in the spring of 2027 if it has been accepted.
The distinction is given by the International Institute of Gastronomy, Culture, Arts and Tourism (IGCAT), a Spanish organization, following an evaluation process that assesses both the gastronomic potential of a region (history, touristic relevance, existing food-related ecosystem, from producers to restaurants) and the capacity to work together to develop opportunities for visitors to experience the region from the perspective of local food. While every process is led by an organization (local authorities in the case of Harghita and Banat, a trade association for Dobruja), they only act as catalysts of the process and the evaluation must see that there is a critical mass of involved local actors - from universities to authorities to businesses.
Carmen Ispas, one of the people leading Dobruja’s candidature, says that "As soon as people hear the name of this project, they go straight to «oh, it's about food, it's about festivals, it's about recipes.» It is about food, if you look at it as a vehicle for developing various programs, projects, and long-term strategies." What the regions expect, after being awarded the status, is more tourists, a healthier business environment and, most of all, lasting cooperation.
§ 02 · Recent issues
From the plancha.
Bi-weekly · All issues →
bucharest
3 min read
What it's like to get 10,000 people to dine out in a single week
Bucharest Food Week brought 110 restaurants together, filled tables with first-time guests and sold out a Parisian pop-up in six hours. Here's what the organisers learned.
pricing
5 min read
The soundtrack to a $60 loaf of bread
Alexei wrote the album playing in New York's most talked-about bakery. Here is how that happened, why a Graz bread chain went viral, and what background music legally costs you in Hungary, Romania and Austria.
budapest
3 min read
The perks and complications of running a restaurant with foreign staff
At Budapest’s Goli, Petra Saás says the daily anxiety about who will turn up has largely gone. An international team, English as the working language and recruitment through expat Facebook groups are central to the story.
jobs
4 min read
Summer ends, the labour shortage changes postcode
The season closed, the people who ran it are between contracts for six weeks, but some already have a start date in Tyrol.
menu
4 min read
Her product strategy was to get banned by the Orthodox Church
How Central Europe's most sacred dishes became its best marketing assets.
heatwave
5 min read
Heatwave menus and 50°C kitchens, Bucharest under water and the treacherous Austrian sausage
Record heat, flooded basements, carcinogenic sausages, an ice-cream shortage, and kitchen life at 45°C in five reels.
Page 1 of 3
Older issues →
The files.
§ 03 · The rooms in the kitchen
- 01 menu Dispatches filed under menu. 6 issues →
- 02 pricing Dispatches filed under pricing. 6 issues →
- 03 interview Dispatches filed under interview. 4 issues →
- 04 budapest Dispatches filed under budapest. 3 issues →
- 05 plancha express Dispatches filed under plancha express. 3 issues →
- 06 inflation Dispatches filed under inflation. 3 issues →
§ 04 · The line is talking
Operator takes.
Quotes from the line
game
"Autumn in CEE: Bakery money, restaurant farewells and Vienna’s wild boar."
— Zsofi Bajor, Alexei Korolyov, Georgiana Ilie
bucharest
"What it's like to get 10,000 people to dine out in a single week"
— Georgiana Ilie
pricing
"The soundtrack to a $60 loaf of bread"
— Alexei Korolyov, Georgiana Ilie, Zsofi Bajor
budapest
"The perks and complications of running a restaurant with foreign staff"
— Zsofi Bajor
jobs
"Summer ends, the labour shortage changes postcode"
— Zsofi Bajor, María Paula Ángel Benavides, Alexei Korolyov, Georgiana Ilie
menu
"Her product strategy was to get banned by the Orthodox Church"
— Georgiana Ilie, Zsofi Bajor, Alexei Korolyov, María Paula Ángel Benavides
heatwave
"Heatwave menus and 50°C kitchens, Bucharest under water and the treacherous Austrian sausage"
— Zsofi Bajor, Georgiana Ilie, Alexei Korolyov
Budapest: one wedding and four funerals
Not everyone in Budapest's hospitality scene is celebrating this autumn. While one of the city's best-known bakeries is preparing for an ambitious new chapter, four restaurants have recently said goodbye, each for a very different reason.
The Wedding: One of Budapest's best-known (and supposedly most expensive) premium bakeries, Vaj, currently operating at three locations across the city, has welcomed new investors, with two of its three founders exiting and co-founder Kristóf Markó retaining a one-third stake. With annual revenue of around HUF 1.9 billion (€4.8 million), the new owners are planning additional locations, new formats and 50% revenue growth in 2027. Not a bad marriage proposal.
Funeral No. 1: Tranzit by Flow - veganism wasn't enough. Housed in a former bus station transformed into a striking hospitality space, Tranzit by Flow had a setting as distinctive as its plant-based menu. But after eight years of building the Flow brand and just 18 months at its latest location, the bistro closed in October. The owners say they simply couldn't build a large enough base of regular customers. A reminder that even a great location and an interesting concept don't necessarily translate into a sustainable business.
Funeral No. 2: Hippeace - the end of the vegetable stew bar. Hungarian food personality Ferenc Szatmári, better known as Főzelékes Feri, closed his tiny Klauzál Square restaurant after three years. The concept revolved around főzelék, Hungary's traditional thick vegetable stews - or, as an American expat once described them to me, "adult baby food”. Szatmári is returning to the media business, leaving behind an interesting question: can a famous food personality turn a very specific everyday dish into a lasting restaurant concept?
Funeral No. 3: Bereg Embassy - trouble with the neighbours. After 11 years, the popular Buda café and bar closed in October. According to its owners, a prolonged dispute with the building's residential community made continuing impossible. Sometimes the biggest threat to a restaurant isn't competition, food costs or a shortage of guests. It's the neighbours upstairs.
Funeral No. 4: Vietnámi Gulyás - a chef's farewell, for now. Chef Krisztián Huszár's distinctive Hungarian-Asian restaurant closed its Frankel Leó Street location. Known for its unconventional fusion of Hungarian flavours and Asian techniques, the restaurant had developed a loyal following. The team has hinted at a possible return, so this may be more of a goodbye to the location than to the concept itself.
Vienna is now selling its own wild boar
From Vienna, there are two things to report, strangely related (Alexei here). First, a fox trotted past my building the other night, cool as you like. I live in the central 8th district and, while I had seen foxes further out, this was a first so close to home. As I fumbled in my pocket for my phone, the fox was followed by a weasel. He gave me a very casual look. I wonder where they were off to.
The reason I’m telling you this is because since 2022, Vienna has run its municipal food brand, Wiener Gusto – arguably the only European capital to do so. It sells flour, lentils and honey – all made from ingredients grown within the city limits. But it also offers game meat. Obviously, foxes and weasels are spared, but how about venison steaks, anyone?
The range is seasonal, and if you are partial to game, wild boar mince has just come in.
Delivery is currently limited to Austria, and Wiener Gusto products are available at select supermarkets in Vienna. Now of course Vienna is unusually well endowed with open space, with around 50 percent of its territory made up of parks, woods and farmland. But surely other cities have areas suitable for agriculture too. Should they follow Vienna’s lead?
Romania: Three European Gastronomic Regions in the Following Three Years
Harghita, Banat and Dobruja, three regions in Romania, have (or are trying to) become European Gastronomic Regions: Harghita in 2027, Banat in 2028 and Dobruja is a candidate for 2029 and it will find out in the spring of 2027 if it has been accepted.
The distinction is given by the International Institute of Gastronomy, Culture, Arts and Tourism (IGCAT), a Spanish organization, following an evaluation process that assesses both the gastronomic potential of a region (history, touristic relevance, existing food-related ecosystem, from producers to restaurants) and the capacity to work together to develop opportunities for visitors to experience the region from the perspective of local food. While every process is led by an organization (local authorities in the case of Harghita and Banat, a trade association for Dobruja), they only act as catalysts of the process and the evaluation must see that there is a critical mass of involved local actors - from universities to authorities to businesses.
Carmen Ispas, one of the people leading Dobruja’s candidature, says that "As soon as people hear the name of this project, they go straight to «oh, it's about food, it's about festivals, it's about recipes.» It is about food, if you look at it as a vehicle for developing various programs, projects, and long-term strategies." What the regions expect, after being awarded the status, is more tourists, a healthier business environment and, most of all, lasting cooperation.
Bucharest has plenty of good restaurants, but getting people through their doors has become harder lately. Inflation, rising operating costs and cautious consumers have left the city's hospitality industry under pressure. Summer is particularly difficult, when much of Bucharest heads for the seaside.
Alexandra and Cătălin Cincu, a couple well known in Romania's food scene, with 70,000 Instagram followers and nearly 15 years of experience in journalism and digital marketing, decided to give people a reason to come back to the table.
Alongside restaurant reservation platform ialoc.ro and branding agency Studio Maller, they launched Bucharest Food Week, held from 14 to 20 September.
Restaurants would create special menus at three fixed prices: 69, 119 and 189 lei (approximately €14, €24 and €38), while ialoc handled reservations and the organisers took care of promotion. The ambition was to encourage customers to try new places and maybe later return.
They started working on the project in May, a four-people team. They settled for the third week of September (14-20) because school starts the week before and most people would be back in town.
Rather than relying on emails, the organisers approached restaurant owners personally. Alexandra spoke to 60 in just three days. By September, 110 restaurants had signed up, alongside roughly 40 bars, bakeries and other venues offering special dishes or drinks.
The programme grew to include masterclasses, wine tastings, collaborative dinners and a pop-up by Les Enfants du Marché, the cult Parisian restaurant, hosted at Bucharest's Tabra. (Less than a month later, on 12 October, a fire destroyed its permanent home at Paris's historic Marché des Enfants Rouges.)
The week in numbers
- 18,000–20,000 estimated participants, including approximately 10,300 diners with honoured reservations, another 2,000 walk-ins and more than 6,000 purchases of special products.
- 40% more honoured reservations than the annual weekly average.
- 85% of reservations came from first-time diners at the restaurants they chose.
- 10% more reservations even at restaurants outside the event.
- 412 seats sold out in six hours for the Les Enfants du Marché pop-up, with more than 800 people on the waiting list.
Fine-dining restaurants Kane and NOUA sold out their allocations on the first day. At Miez bakery, a special meat pie sold out by 11am daily, even after production doubled. For a city whose operators have been complaining about falling spending, those are encouraging numbers.
Why some restaurants did better than others
Until last month, Martin Auer's organic bakery chain was largely unknown outside Graz, Austria's second-largest city, where it is based and runs most of its branches. These days it is global viral material, because of its new New York outpost, RYE, or rather because of the $60 price tag on its signature rye sourdough.
For me (Alexei here), the story began in December 2023, when an email asked whether I'd write copy for the shop. It was going to be not just an upscale bakery but a European concept store: besides bread, there'd be ceramics, loafers and glassware from niche but high-quality producers in Austria, Germany and Spain. My commission was to talk to them all and write it up the way I write for Monocle. One of the producers was GEA Waldviertler, the Austrian shoemaker whose founder, Heinrich Staudinger, once invented his own currency before running, unsuccessfully, for president.
One meeting drifted from texts to the question of what music the shop would play. Martin Auer, who was there, said he would ideally like specially made music playing at all times, Monday to Sunday, just as there were specially made interiors and imagery. Everyone, me included, replied that this wasn't humanly possible in the timeframe: you'd need several bands working nonstop for years, or an extraordinarily prolific composer. Still, I said, I could try. The most I could do was an album of seven or eight songs.
This wasn't entirely spur of the moment. I am a musician. I have been in bands, and have a solo project, Alexei Korolyov & the Single Pieces (the single pieces being the friends who play with me). It also turned out Martin liked much of the same music I do: the Beatles, 1960s rhythm-and-blues, Neil Young. The one reference we agreed on was Young's minimalist, guitar-driven soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's 1995 Western Dead Man. A bakery with a Jarmusch soundtrack, I thought. How great is that?
The result is not quite as dark, and I am in no way comparing myself to Neil Young. You can listen to the album (for free) on
The idea was a song for each day of the week, plus one extra, just in case. Hence the titles: Wednesday, Why?, Thursday Soon and so on. They play at anchor points through the day, marking the change from morning to midday, midday to afternoon.
So far it seems to be working. There are even people Shazaming the songs, although they may simply be trying to find out who wrote such rubbish. All I can say for myself is that it feels great to be given free licence to create, and to have the result played on repeat in New York, of all places.
The family behind the $60 loaf
A Balaton trader interviewed by G7 last month described his year: work the lake to the end of August, a short break in September, then Austria for the winter. In summer 2024, Hungarian citizens were 11.5% of everyone employed in Austrian accommodation and gastronomy, the largest foreign group in the sector. Romanians were another 3.7% and only 41.3% held an Austrian passport.
So the labour market in the first week of September may not be a whole lot easier than the summer, certainly not for long.
The people who ran the terraces at Balaton or Mamaia are back in Budapest and Bucharest, and a good share already know where they will be in a few months, when the winter season starts. You have six to ten weeks before ski resorts take your options away.
Think in shifts instead of seasons
Giggle is a Budapest platform where employers post individual shifts and workers apply for them: 160,000-plus registered users, Romania since last year. We spoke to co-founder Ádám Sebestyén.
Ioana Mihai had a fantasy about her product launch: the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church would publicly condemn it. Free national press, instant notoriety, the perfect stunt. It never happened, nobody protested, but her funeral cake still sold.
'Colivă' is the dessert that closes funeral and commemoration meals across southern and eastern Romania: boiled wheat berries with sugar, citrus zest, vanilla, rum and a great deal of ground walnut, decorated with an Orthodox cross. To be served, it has to be blessed by a priest. Ioana grew up with it and at eight announced she'd start a colivă business so she could finally eat her fill.
In 2022, aged 32 and working as a marketer, she did. She bet her generation would buy nostalgia and tourists would buy novelty, developed variants with fruit, chocolate, jam, nuts and - for Halloween - black tahini, and launched in 2024 as Mori, colive de viață ("Die! Colivas for living").
Sales have swung between a few hundred and 4,000 units a month but now Carrefour and Freshful have now picked it up for distribution, which completely changes the math.
Her explanation of success: it's good colivă. Her grandmother's recipe, traditional enough for the nostalgic, daring enough on the toppings to pull in the curious.
She's not alone.
Once a dish becomes iconic enough in this region, it gets stuffed, wrapped, deep-fried, turned into a burger or a pizza.
Some become bestsellers, others perhaps, should never have happened.
Today, we'll show you both the absurdity and the real economics at play.
Hungary: 'lángos' as national monument
Hungary's two most bastardised foods, 'lángos' and 'kürtős kalács' (chimney cake), share a foundation: simple yeast dough. Once people love the base, anything can be built on top.
Welcome to Plancha Express, we have six quick summer stories about the weather, restaurants and hospitality during a heatwave:
- The kitchen at 50°C
- Menus for the heatwave
- Under water in Bucharest
- Your grill sausage may be working against you
- Austria is running out of Eskimos
- Five reels from inside the heatwave kitchen
The kitchen at 50°C
Last week, Hungary recorded its hottest day ever: 42°C in the northeast, above 41°C in Budapest, a nationwide heat alert, and water restrictions in several regions. The heat became enough of a public concern that Prime Minister Péter Magyar called on shopping centers, retailers and restaurants to offer drinking water to anyone who needed it.
For operators, the real story starts behind the dining room.
A 38°C day outside translates into 45–50°C inside a kitchen.
At that point heat stops being an inconvenience and becomes an operational risk: staff wellbeing, food quality, service speed, and ultimately profitability.
Governments are starting to treat it that way. According to a Reuters overview, France, Spain, Germany and Italy have introduced or strengthened rules requiring employers to adapt working conditions during heatwaves: extra breaks, adjusted schedules, drinking water, cooling. Hungary has no hospitality-specific heat rules yet, but employers remain responsible for safe working conditions under general labour safety law, and authorities routinely recommend free water, more frequent breaks, reduced physical workload and adequate ventilation.
Operator take: Ask every member of your kitchen team one question: "what makes your station unbearable above 35°C?", the fixes usually cost less than you expect, and better extraction and cooling may return more than your next oven.
Menus for the heatwave
§ Files
43
Rooms in the kitchen — operations, customers, industry and the rest.
§ Cadence
Bi-weekly
In your inbox, never on a service day.
§ Price
€0
Free to read. Members get the spreadsheets.
§ 06 · Who's on the line
Written by operators, for operators.
For people who run restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses in Central Europe.
Zsofi Bajor
I’m a Budapest-based hospitality innovator and food storyteller with a rare dual background: 15 years in television and media and a second career building real-world food concepts that change how people eat.
16 issues filed
Georgiana Ilie
Bucharest
Journalist and anthropologist looking at how food influences our world.
16 issues filed
Alexei Korolyov
14 issues filed
Peter Erdelyi
Budapest-Vienna
8 issues filed
§ 07 · Subscribe
It's free.
It's free.
It's good.
It's Bi-weekly.
One email every issue. No hidden ads.
Unsubscribe in one click — we run a clean list.
Unsubscribe in one click — we run a clean list.