Street food is usually associated with America although the genre is much older – in fact, it was a common eating habit in Ancient Rome. Here’s how the people of Pest first consumed on the hoof a century ago.
Think about Budapest’s Golden Age of the 1890s and your mind turns to maidservants at home and elegant coffeehouses around town. But the city’s first automated food and drinks machine clicked into operation in 1899, right at the start of today’s Bajcsy-Zsilinszky út. The idea was not Hungarian – the first had been set up in Berlin in 1895, the success of the so-called Quisisana automatic buffet, exported to other major European cities.
Quisisana then opened another outlet on Kerepesi út. The first was later relocated to Erzsébet körút 44-46, with similar buffets later located all over the city, on Andrássy út, Erzsébet körút and Rákóczi út. The offer was mixed, from cold sandwiches to cooked sausages, and hearty soups to cheap one-course meals, and even a champagne tap was installed in one.
At first, these vending machines were used by a modest, middle-class clientele, but as soon as the novelty wore off, they became the domain of poorer workers and students. No wonder, as, according to a 1914 newspaper article, you could get a four-course feast for 1 crown and a sandwich for 20 pennies.
Demand saw dozens opened in Budapest. They even benefited from the crisis of 1929, at least for a while. However, recalibrating them in line with inflation, with buffets always full, proved problematic, and many closed. The last outlet, Iris on József körút, shut for good in 1941. Thereafter, it was only possible to eat on the cheap from vending machines at the Ilkovics beside Nyugati station – and only until the end of the World War II.
