Dóra Tóth-Deme’s childhood dream came true when she opened the Kuglóf last January. The shop that serves as a bakery, a café and a breakfast and lunch place is approaching its first birthday, which is celebrated with persistent experimentation, a selection made of quality ingredients, novel ideas and, of course, unrelenting enthusiasm.
Sweet, savory, friendly
Kuglóf is in a small street, Pesti Barnabás utca, that opens from Váci utca. The place is not too big and given the popularity it could cause some cramped situations for those having their meals on site. The exterior loveliness of the place is even more explicit inside: the unique, simple, adorable furnishings mixed with the appetizing looks of the pastry. The owner let us know that the inspiration for Kuglóf came from an atmospheric but a little run-down Parisian bistro, what she visited several times in her life.
Among the sweet and savory pastry there are some which are hand-made in the Kuglóf manuafacture in Érd after unique recipes made of natural ingredients. Here works Gabriella Patera, who folds flaky pastry with butter instead of margarine, uses filling devoid of adhesive and Belgian chocolate, to mention only a few of the secrets utilized in the making of the delicacies.
Sweet dreamsMany little girls dream about having the sand cakes out from the shapes in the sandbox made into reality at one time. Then this enthusiasm either persists and the family table is swarmed with loads of delicacies or it proves to be only a fleeting one. In Dóra Tóth-Deme’s case the childhood passion seemed to be so lasting that Kuglóf is undoubtedly the realization of the dream of her life. Besides fulfilling the tasks of the owner and the manager she regularly assists in baking and other chores in the shop, despite spending a lot of time in the kitchen anyways.
One can buy here syrups (elderberry, sour cherry and blackcurrant), home-made jams, butter croissant made after the owner’s recipe, coffee specialties, sandwiches, home-made yoghurt with honey and freshly pressed orange juice, as well. One of us tasted the “cottage cheese bag”, which, warmed up, proved to be a perfect choice for the lovers of classic sweet flavors.
The spelt croissant and home-made yoghurt with honey was the other choice, and a more health-conscious one at that.
Thanks largely to the yoghurt we can state that this was not at all less flavorful than the other.
You can have lunch in Kuglóf, too, the menu is made for a week in advance, and the food is prepared in the piarist kitchen in the same block. The sandwiches also seem like a good choice for a bite during the day. They are filled with, for example, salami of grey cattle or mangalica, Prague or Spanish ham. But what’s up with kuglóf, the marble cake the name of the place derives from? At Christmas, for instance, they sold a kind made after a 200-year-old recipe, now, however, even the mini-kuglófs are missing from the repertoire but only until spring at the most.
Flavorful momentsThe one-year-old Kuglóf has witnessed many a heartwarming moments. One of the most moving of them is that of a woman who came to have breakfast as a tourist, and continued to do so on each of her days spent in Hungary. During having her usual coffee-pastry combination she got to talking to another tourist, a man, whom she has already visited a couple of months later in Australia. The guests love kuglóf, and 70% of them comes back after the first visit and bite. And foreigners have a really unusual way of showing their appriciation. Sometimes they give us little presents, thanking us for the minutes spent here.
Piece of cake“You’ve either got what it takes, or you shouldn’t even start.” – says Dóra. She started it and goes on doing it with great talent. Exactly three plans are to be realized. A bakery on the spot to guarantee the freshness of pastry and an increasing number of goods with wines and bites suitable to them to be sold in the near future. We’ll let further details be surprise...until then you will surely find flavors to be discovered at Kuglóf!
