Dorfy Day Trip: The Best Train Station Restaurant Ever

When you're a double threat like a Prince-Bishop,
you get live in a Brühl shack like this.

We all have regrets. They might be decisions we made or errors in judgement that haunt us long afterwards. Yep, I'm talking about train station food.

One of my many train station food regrets were two boiled sausages I bought because I was hungry and couldn't imagine a three-hour trip with an empty stomach. It did not long for me to start imagining how nice that train ride would have been on an empty stomach. 

The sad, week-old boiled sausages. The dry, crusty bread that tasted like diesel exhaust. Yellow mustard somehow made more yellow from age. If some foods can knock years off your life, that meal took a few off mine.

The train station in Brühl is a delicious exception to the rule, which is ironic considering when you pronounce Brühl: you draw out the umlauted 'u' like you're puking. Try it out loud.

You might not have an opportunity to practice saying it though. Brühl is a small village outside Cologne. Aside from the stately homes near the train station – usually these neighbourhoods are for scoring rock or smack, not a 19th century mansion – Brühl's main draw is the Max Ernst Museum and the fancy Baroque palace, with its gardens, Cologne's Prince-Bishop lived in.

After working up an appetite visiting an M.C. Escher exhibit at the museum, and it being a cold, soggy Rhineland afternoon, we went into the Brühler Wirtshaus for a warm snack and cold beer. 

It was crowded and not with the usual desperadoes you might encounter at a German train station. There were old folks and young families, all enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon at the train station.

Even without a reservation – they make those at this establishment – we managed to get a table in this crowded spot and order some beers – Brühl is just outside Cologne, putting in Kölsch country, which is fine by me because it's delicious stuff.

Kata ordered the tomato soup and the a warm pretzel, both of which passed muster with her, since she knows her soup and pretzels. The pretzel was served warm, an uncommon thing at a train station, but also with hunk of garlic butter. This was a first-class pretzel experience.

I got the Currywurst, which could go wrong when you order it in the wrong place. 

In its crudest, simplest form Currywurst is a sliced sausage covered with ketchup and curry powder, often with fries on the side. A nice place, like Brühler Wirtshaus, will blend the curry and ketchup into a tasty sauce. My first brush with it was from a Berlin street vendor, where the Currywurst slinger just squirted the ketchup onto the sausage and then shook some curry powder on top.

Most food places put a little effort into their Currywurst. There's a place in the Dorf that sprinkles gold dust onto theirs. Another outdoor patio spot on the Rhine serves so-so sausages with an amazing ketchup. The train station Currywurst in the Wirtshaus Brühler had the whole package: a decent sausage, fried crispy on the outside with a dose of ketchup that was actually spicy (German spicy is usually mild by North American standards).

So if you ever find yourself in Brühl, ask yourself why. If you know the answer, then hit Brühler Wirtshaus for the best train station dining experience ever.

Have you ever met happier people about to eat at a train station?

Marshall's Guide to Hungarian Cooking

Photo by  Katalin Varga

I recently tried cooking goulash. It wasn’t a failure, but I wouldn’t say it was a resounding success either. It was decent, edible... and we’ll leave it at that.

The edible goulash is my most recent foray into Hungarian cuisine. Scrambled eggs with onions and paprika was my first, and easiest, move – though it took a few attempts to get it right (fry the onions first, sprinkle in the paprika, wait a minute, add the eggs). I’ve made pörkölt – a paprika flavoured meat stew – with some success and no complaints (although I was the only one eating it).

Lately, my best dish has been the lécso. This is paprika-flavoured stew (yeah, I put paprika in almost everything) of onions, peppers, and tomatoes with meat or sausage, or meat and sausage, or meat, sausage, and eggs. 

All I knew about Hungarian cuisine when I arrived was goulash, but I’ve gotten good at making lécso. It’s cheap and healthy and you can put in as much meat as you want, because a meal ain’t a meal in Hungary unless there's meat and onions.

I’m a lazy cook too. I’m not good at fussing over ingredients or worrying about spices and all that junk. I just want to throw my stuff into a pot with a bunch of paprika and eat it. If I get leftovers for a few lunches, even better.

Lécso suits my laziness. it’s a breeze to make and what can go wrong with a food that includes a lot of onions and paprika? Start with the lécso and see how Magyar you get in the kitchen.

All you need is:

Fatty bacon (You can use oil, but you lose out on the Hungarian-ness)

A bunch of tomatoes

A bunch of large onion 

Two bunches of big red or green

A chili pepper

Smoked paprika (the spice)

Sausage (Hungarians use a sort of Frankfurter, I like spicy sausage. But really, almost any meat is fine.)

Cook the bacon until the fat is melted and add your onions. Cook those until they’re soft-ish and add two teaspoons of the smoked paprika. Cook for a little bit longer, then add the peppers. Drink some wine, let the peppers soften, add the sausage. Let those cook a bit then add the tomatoes and one more teaspoon of paprika. Put the lid on and let it all stew. If you're feeling adventurous, whisk a few eggs and stir them into the stew. Serve with a slab of bread (I like the dark rye) and have some more wine.

Burgers of Budapest

If I closed my eyes before I left for Budapest, and tried imagining all the food I'd be eating here, a burger would not be among them. Goulash. Cheese. Pickled cabbage. Blood sausage. But burgers? Nem.

In these last few months, Budapest has been schooling me in the way of the burger. What I did not realize before I arrived was that Hungarians are a nation of meat lovers. Burgers happen to be a tasty byproduct of that meat love.

An example. My friend Marcin was visiting, after way too much beer, palinka, whiskey and wine, we found a burger place that had opened that day. What luck. We ordered the establishment's signature burger with fries. Even in our inebriated state, we knew we were eating something special.

Earlier in the summer, Teak shared photos he took at the Burger Fest with his SLR. The food shots were more like food porn. Dripping sauce, and gooey cheese atop cow-sized patties of meat, ready to be noshed upon. The Earl of Sandwich could not imagine the possibilities.

I find this ironic in my own monolingual way because the Hungarian word for cheese is sajt, which is pronounced almost like a four-letter word. So, when I order a cheeseburger in my broken Hungarian, it sounds like I’m asking for Shite Burger.

Despite the lingual pitfalls, I've made my burger rounds, there are places that locals and foreigners at the office alike all know and love.

Most of us are gorging our way through the burger stations of the cross, and there is not end in sight, which gives us little to complain about. In fact the sin is not to partake in the burgers of Budapest.

As an old grill cook, I know it's easy to make good burger, and it's easy to mess up and make a bad burger  but it's difficult to make a great burger – there are plenty of great burgers in Budapest.

When Kata and I sampled the burgers at W35, we were both impressed. This small, side-street eatery took a good burger, and made it better, they added their own little Mex-Tex touch, which is also unusual back home.

So the burger tour continues, and I sleep soundly at night knowing there are more delicious Shite Burgers out there, waiting to be eaten.

How I do Lunch

I have only worked at one office where no one complained about the area’s lunch options. That was near the St. Lawrence Market in Toronto. No. Wait. Actually there was one complaint: There were so many options, everyone suffered from choice anxiety come lunch hour.

Every other office in Toronto I worked in had a legion of complaints about nearby lunch options. There are too few places. Or it’s all fast food. There’s not enough fast food. It’s too ethnic. It’s not vegetarian enough. Too much gluten. Not enough gluten.

As someone who paid Toronto rent and wrestled with student loans every month my only complaint was that buying lunch every day was expensive. I usually packed a lunch and treated myself to lunch on Fridays, which, depending on the office and workload and time of year, was a patio beer lunch.

Save for the lack of beer lunches, there is little to complain about in Budapest. A good cafeteria downstairs serves hot, square meals. The price is measured by weight, so I guess it depends on your appetite. The food is good too. They even do a mean meatloaf some times. MEATLOAF!

If I’m looking to get out of the building, and want to avoid vegetables with my lunch, there is Maros Étterem, a homey neighbourhood restaurant/pub across the street from the office. They serve up a daily lunch special, usually a meat and a potato. It’s hearty, simple food that does the job for a good price. It has also turned into a post-work drinking hole for a few colleagues, where One-Drink Plans often go awry.

Maros Étterem: “The Best Restaurant in Budapest.” Just because it’s hyperbole doesn’t mean it isn’t true.

A few colleagues have taken a shine to Maros. One art director, Carlos, the unofficial mayor of Budapest, declared it the best restaurant in the city and awarded them with a certificate he created in InDesign.

But feelings in the office are mixed about the venerable Maros Étterem. Walk around the office to round up a lunch posse for Maros and you will get enthusiastic joiners or nay-sayers that scrunch their faces on the mention of Maros. Some claim to have gotten sick from the food. Others bemoan the food’s sodium content. Others inexplicably dislike its 1970s-style wallpaper. Still Maros Étterem has its fans among the agency’s workforce and while there is no such thing as a free lunch, there is definitely a good lunch to be found at Maros.

UPDATE: For lunch today we visited Maros. I had the duck liver soup to start with pork and potatoes in some kind of sauce that the Hungarian waiter could not translate into English. It was delicious.

ONE MORE UPDATE: A Lunch Wheel has appeared in the office with all the lunch choices nearby. For some reason it's been landing on the sinfully delicious fast food more often than not.