Most! a Most Welcome Addition to Budapest Bar Scene

With the weather currently alternating between foggy and wet and foggy and not-so-wet, Budapest nightlife has had to move indoors for the following months. Consequently, we are glad to report of a newish opening in District VI, which recently saw its insane nightlife ban more or less reversed. Situated at the former location of the now-defunct Articsóka Restaurant is the recently opened Most! (meaning "now" in Hungarian) which is related to Budapest's other present-tense hipster drinking establishment Jelen.

First off, I have to say the staff behind the bar were unexpectedly friendly. There's polite, and then there's friendly, and the staff I encountered the three times I dropped in were definitely the latter.

There are three rooms to Most, with the front room resembling a café, the middle room being the main bar area, and the back room being reserved for performances, which had things going on the two times I went on a weekend. There's also a terrace atop the front, but you might want to wait until April to check that part out.

Also, this place has a bathroom attendant, which I am usually a strict opponent of since all those people usually do is charge you for soap and paper towels while doing nothing to keep the facilities clean. Fortunately, at Most the opposite is the case, as the attendant doesn't pester you and the toilets are quite clean and smell of disinfectant.

Most also has a kitchen, of which the only item I've tried is their veggie samosas. I would never imply that I'm an expert on Indian cuisine, but they tasted good to me. We'll have a restaurant review over at sister site chew.hu soon, but in this post, we're only looking at it from the perspective of a drinking establishment.

And speaking of drinks, in terms of beer, they've got the increasingly dominant Heineken family on tap which starts with Soproni at Ft 450 (€1.65) for a korsó, going up incrementally in price with Zlatý Bažant, Heineken and Edelweiss. House wines were Ft 200 per deciliter, meaning about €1.50 for a glass.

Also, even with performances going on in the backroom, you can still easily carry a conversation in the main rooms without resorting to shouting to be heard. This, however, lead to the one negative experience I had, when one night after the band in the photograph finished their set, they decided to continue playing for everyone in the main room. One of the employees asked if my friend and I could move to another table, since our table was where the band wanted to perform.

I informed the guy we would gladly move if he found us an empty table to move to. After a quick scan, he told us "but there aren't any", to which I simply told him "well, we've been sitting here before the band even started playing in the other room, and don't feel like losing a place to sit." Since we were planning on leaving in a couple minutes anyway, it posed no problem, and we finished our drinks with the bang playing next to us, but if we had planned on staying, I can't say I would have been overjoyed.

Nonetheless, despite this minor hitch (which I assume is the product of one overzealous barman and not policy) District VI now has yet another place where you can drop in to find some warmth in the bottom of an empty glass. And if any new bars called "Azonnal" or "Rögtön" open up in the near future, we'll know they're worth checking out too.