Gourmet Festival Budapest 7-10th June

Gourmet Festival is a gastro-cultural festival which brings together the best wineries, pálinka distillers, restaurants, confectioners and gourmet stores creating a market place for producers to show their homemade cheese, ham, salami, sausage, jam, honey, chocolate and other delicacies offering them for tasting.

Myself, as a gourmet of sweets of course would recommend among the many exhibitors the Gerbaud coffee house and its sweets and of course not only at the Gourmet Festival, as you just to have walk into this wonderful coffee, is worth to make a visit to Budapest! The silk-carpeted walls, the crystal chandeliers, gilded tables exuded style that drew people from the highest social stratas in 19th-century Budapest and still nowadays.

Henrik Kugler established the coffee house in 1858. 

Since Kugler didn't have an heir he sold the cafe to Emil Gerbeaud descendant of a talented Swiss confectioner family.

Gerbeaud expanded the cafe and developed it into one of Europe's finest coffee house and pastry shop.
He added new cakes to the menu and introduced modern confectionery techniques.
Gerbeaud even founded a small chocolate factory where the legendary pralines
and other sweets were made.

Everyone who counted at that time visited the place including the Habsburg royal family and many foreigners. Sissi, wife of Emperor Franz Joseph and Queen of Hungary always dropped in the Gerbeaud cafe when she was in Budapest. Unfortunately the two world wars ruined the coffee house culture including the Gerbeaud. After Emil Gerbeaud died in 1919,  his wife managed the establishment until her death 1940.

The two son-in-laws inherited the business  left the country in 1945. The state took over the ownership of the cafe during the communist era and renamed it Vörösmarty Cafe after the square where it stands. 

After the II. World War the Gerbeaud cafe continued to be the most exclusive coffee house and confectionery in Budapest though lost some of its old grandeur.

In 1984 the Gerbeaud family managed to buy back the cafe and its original name. 

By 1990 the Gerbeaud cafe regained its lustre and it was again the place not to miss by foreign visitors coming to Budapest.
During its renovation in 1997 the cafe received fine wood panelling, lavish brocade wall covers, marble tables that enhance the nostalgia and refined elegance of the place but still managed to maintain a relaxing atmosphere.

Gerbeaud's specialties include famous cakes, such as Dobos cakes,

which is one of my favourite, as well as all kinds of cream cakes, extravagant bakery goods and exquisite ice-creams, not to forget the real Gerbaud, the cake!

The wide selection of handmade bonbons in decorative wooden boxes can be wonderful presents to anyone with a sweet tooth.

This year the showplace of the Gourmet Festival is the Millenáris Park in the Buda side of city. 
Venue: Millenáris Park, trams 4, 6, M2 metro Széll Kálmán tér stop - cc. 5 minute walk from there
Entrance fee: daily ticket: 2 900 HUF/day, the ticket price includes a tasting glass