Eating Notes (II): NY Times Prints BS about BP Restaurants

Incredibly, it's happened again: The New York Times, cosmopolitan America's newspaper of record, has printed another goofball story about dining in Budapest. But this time it's gotten it so wrong, so outlandishly and laughably wrong, that we have to wonder whether the entire practice of sending journalists abroad to take the pulse of a foreign city's culinary scene isn't as dead as the trees pulped up to make the kilo+ slabs of Sunday Times that the story was meant to help fill. We're tempted to re-print the entire piece, so that its awfulness can be savored in full after it migrates behind the Times' pay firewall. But we'll limit ourselves to correcting its most egregious boners and factual boo-boos, starting with the basic premise, which is that the city is enjoying a renaissance of Euro-Asian fusion cuisine:

[In] today's Budapest, the goose livers are often paired with chutney, and everything else seems to come with a sizable pinch of Eastern spice.

Don't get us wrong: we'd love it if Budapest were somehow infected with a case of culinary yellow fever. But it isn't. In fact, the one thing that probably sets Budapest apart from its peers in the region is the lack of a dining public interested in mixing Occident and Orient. In other words, that "sizeable pinch of European spice" is nothing more than a heaping wheelbarrow of bullshit.

Now why would a newspaper like the Times print something so utterly untrue? Simple: because the journalist feeding them - in this case, a (we believe) Prague-based freelancer - didn't know any better, or needed a hook with which to lure in an otherwise indifferent editor. In fact, we'd be willing to bet that the conversation went something not totally unlike this:

Freelancer: So how about that idea of a story about Budapest restaurants?
Editor: Goulash! Hate it!
Freelancer: But did I mention that they are having a, er, renaissance of Euro-Asian fusion cuisine?
Editor: Really?
Freelancer: yeah… sure.
Editor: Fabulous! Seared day boat John Dory goulash with a galangal, ginger, and kaffir lime rouille - I love it!
Freelancer: Whatever you say.

Actually, we can think of another reason why the writer would have pitched the Asian-fusion fiction: because they were eating on the Times' tab, and anything Asian-fusion is likely to be expensive. What's the point of going through all the trouble to get a commission to write about Hungarian restaurants if you end up stuck in some Hungarian restaurant eating Hungarian food for €10 a plate?

As we said, there are some glaring factual errors in the piece. Mokka is not "just two years old" - it's been there, and mediocre, for at least five - and saying that super-trendy Tom-George offers "a traditional Hungarian setting" (note the photo caption above) is, well, like saying goulash usually comes with a galangal, ginger, and kaffir lime rouille.

But what's so awful about the piece is not its factual mistakes or cluelessness about the latest local dining trends. It's the Pravda-like obliviousness to, or suppression of, the real story about what is going on with some of the restaurants it highlights. Again, don't get us wrong: we love Baraka as much or more than the Times does. But it exists primarily to serve tourists, a large number of whom find out about it from places like... the New York Times. (Baraka was one of a handful of local spots featured in the paper's previous goofball piece on Budapest dining, which was one of the things that led us to launch our list of the Top 33 Restaurants in Budapest.)

So while Hungary and Budapest are filled with wonderful and interesting places to dine out, the Times sends a high-end tourist to superficially profile a high-tourist restaurant so that other high-end tourists can feel like they are in the know while eating the same frou-frou food they eat back home on the Upper West Side or in Marin County. Which frankly seems like a travesty, even if most of these same tourists have come to Budapest fully expecting to spend some time in the Ghetto.