The gastronomical transformation of Budapest’s central Fővám Square began with the opening of the splendid French confectionery Amber’s last year, and this tasteful trend seems to be continuing in 2016. After recent renovations, this inner-city plaza – surrounded by the majestic Liberty Bridge, the Great Market Hall, and the southern tip of the Váci Street promenade – is becoming a destination worthy of its riverfront setting, and the new addition of Up & Down enhances it with a diverse selection of street food and fine dining, along with delicious drinks poured in their underground pub.

Located at Fővám Square 1, the corner building that houses Up & Down overlooks the Great Market Hall and the fantastic riverscape that surrounds the Liberty Bridge. With such a splendid panorama, this brand-new eatery could easily fit into our earlier roundup of the most panoramic restaurants in the Magyar metropolis. On our way there, we bumped into two Italian tourists looking for an eatery serving affordable Hungarian cuisine in the neighborhood, and while it’s our job to know the city inside out, we had a hard time coming up with an answer – all we could tell them off the bat was not to venture toward the tourist-trap eateries of Váci Street. Fővám Square has the amazing French-themed Amber’s confectionery, along with Japanese, Italian, and Greek eateries nearby – but high-quality Hungarian-inspired gastronomy has been difficult to find in this nook of town, until now.Up & Down operates with an eclectic concept: the two-story locale includes a basement watering hole exuding steampunk/American-pub vibes, while the ground-floor restaurant awaits patrons with neatly laid tables, Hungarian-Asian fusion cuisine, and popular street food – like burgers, Asian soups, and pasta creations – to eat on-site or take away. The underground den is perfect for drinking beer with your buddies, whereas the upstairs bar is a more elegant venue with a wide selection of delicious cocktails. The interior of the scenic gastro and entertainment complex is an extravagant, somewhat over-the-top mix of gigantic frames, purple ambient lighting, rustic walls reminiscent of elegant Cuban apartments, Disney-princess chandeliers, and vintage light bulbs. Should you consider picking Up & Down as the venue for your next date, you can rest assured that discussing the interior design details alone will take up at least half an hour. If you’re a fan of the simplicity of Scandinavian design, you probably won’t like this place. However, if you’re up for a bit of experimentation, and you find the idea of enjoying fine dining in a room where naked mannequins speckled with neon paint are hung from the ceiling as more exciting than off-putting, you’ll definitely love the whole setting.The extreme approach that you see in the interior is reflected in the cuisine. The menu features two soups, five starters, eight entrées, and two desserts, and when you flick through the pages, you’ll see there’s hardly any ingredient they don’t incorporate into their dishes, be it vegetables or meats. All of the dishes are rich and very complex: even the goulash consommé (1,450 HUF), the simplest item on the menu, features myriad colorful, tasty veggies. The soup itself is less dense than traditional goulash, which is also demonstrated by the name. The cream soup of the day (1,250 HUF), one of our favorites from our lunch, was spiced up with green cabbage, crisp red-cabbage shavings, and super-thin strips of duck breast.The chefs and owners are all huge fans of the Asian continent, and many of the dishes they serve – prepared with the most fashionable kitchen technology solutions – have a hint of the Orient. Most of the creations arriving at your table contain at least three different textures, like the veal-stuffed kapia sushi with tomato textures (1,450 HUF) and the crazy creamy smoked duck liver with at least five seasonal mushrooms (3,450 HUF). The duck was our absolute favorite main dish with its harmonious mix of breast, heart, and gizzard, Jerusalem artichoke, chestnut, and blueberry (4,250 HUF). Try putting a little bit of everything on your fork, and get ready for an insane flavor explosion. We also sampled the pikeperch fillet (3,450 HUF) with citrusy roasted chicory, hollandaise sauce, and olive sand (olive oil in powder form seasoned with salt), a surf and turf dish, the blood sausage bits with scampi, red cabbage, and quince-infused mustard (3,450 HUF), and the chicken supreme with mango, passion fruit, and sticky rice with gorgonzola (2,950 forints). We loved not only the duck, but also the tender beef cheeks, which were served with bone marrow, tongue, beetroot, and taro purée (3,950 HUF). Naturally, the desserts showcase the same kind of inventiveness with options like white chocolate mousse with truffle, caramelized Shimeji mushroom, salty caramel sauce and cotton candy, or panna cottamade from coconut milk, served with mango and kaffir lime sorbet (1,200 HUF). We are dizzy just typing the names of these amazing dishes, so we can only imagine the effort it takes to actually make and present them attractively. The enthusiasm and keenness to experiment that drive creative chef Dániel Varga, chef János Komonyai, and cook Gábor Szabó are mind-blowing.Even though we didn’t dig into any of the street food dishes, and we only got the chance to test the lovely lemonades from the bar’s extensive selection, our visit to Up & Down was full of pleasant surprises. When you really think about it, this is a totally unique place in town, and the prices – even those of the more sophisticated dishes – are reasonable and fairly similar to what you’d have to shell out at any of the cool bistros downtown.

Up & Down
Address: 1056 Budapest, Fővám tér 1
Opening times: Monday–Sunday 12pm–11pm Reservations: 36-1-226-2329