Reasonably priced hotel in a quiet residential area a little out of town, but easy to get to and within 20 minutes or so via trolleybus (no 74) or metro (the fab line 1 from Mexicoi Utca). It's also only 10 minutes from the city park, and the Szechenyi baths, via public transport (you could walk it in 20-30, but it's a bit bleak to be honest).

Staff are friendly and helpful. They can organise a taxi transfer to/from airport terminals for 5600 HUF each way. (Though a rail link is due to be opened in 2007, according to the Budapest Sun. That's to the city, not to the hotel I guess).

They put us in one of the attic rooms on our first night, which is kind of claustrophobic as it has a skylight you can't see out of without balancing in a frankly reckless fashion on two stools upon the bed (and I'm 6ft tall), but shifted us to a much better room the next morning.

65 euro/room per night, 60 if paid in cash.

Pándorfalu u. 15;
tel/fax: 01 252 0470;
email: panzio@goldhotel.hu
www.goldhotel.hu

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To be honest, we weren't expecting that much from Hungarian cuisine, and sadly on the whole we weren't disappointed. During a 6-day stay we were often left with a heavy, ponderous and slightly queasy feeling as if we'd just been given some bad news, having consumed what we took to be typical dishes (stews, side orders of pasta, lots of meat and few vegetables). Tellingly, this also sums up the facial expressions of many of our fellow diners at a number of eateries.

Lucky breaks came at two main venues: one being the grill houses set up at the open-air wine festival between Deak Ter and Astoria (duck leg, crispy red cabbage, mixed veg), but most significantly (and reliably, as the wine fest isn't an ongoing feature) the fine restaurant Cafe Kor on Sas Utca. We found the place on our penultimate day and had lunch and dinner in there - two meals at one place in a day is something of a first for us.

The restaurant is billed as offering “quintessential Hungarian dishes with an international twist” and this seems to sum it up nicely. The food we had was uniformly excellent, well-presented but not fussy, substantial where necessary but not overbearing - various salads, freshly- and lightly-cooked vegetables, creamy sauces that weren't cloying and drowning the meat or fish. Service was great too - friendly, attentive and relaxed. (We were juggling space on our table at lunch and they offered us somewhere else to sit before it had even crossed our minds to suggest it).

It's quite pricey by local standards, at least compared with the 1000-2000 HUF prices we'd been paying for mains elsewhere, but still very good value. (The wine ramped up the cost of dinner quite a bit, but it still came to about £45 for two - a shared starter, two mains, desert, wine and coffee. Lunch - two salads and asparagus, plus a couple of glasses of wine - was about £18).

It was very busy at lunch and dinner midweek, and they recommend booking. I'm sure there must be many other sources for great Hungarian food, but do check this place out.

Pest V, Sas utca 17;
tel: 311 0053

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Budapest has three metro lines that are great for getting about, but spend a few moments enjoying the look of them too. Line 1 is the oldest (as far as Hosok Tere, anyhow - the extension to Mexicoi Utca was completed in 1973) and is undoubtedly charming (even the little cartoon fanfare noises that signal imminent arrival or departure sound chipper), but I also became quite obsessed with the grimy space-age look of the other two lines, particularly the Dr Who/Kubrick/James Bond look of the Deak Ter station on lines 2 & 3. It's all in the lights, it seems - very photogenic, in it's own brutal fashion. Deak Ter station - as someone else said, it's the Kings Cross of the Budapest system. If you can't find it, you're hopelessly lost, and perhaps in the wrong city.

www.talkingcities.co.uk/budapest_pages/sights_metro.htm

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