Ruszwurm Confectionery

The oldest confectionery in Budapest has been serving pastry from the same tiny shop on the Castle District's main square since 1827, and the interior has barely changed. The original Biedermeier furniture — curved-back chairs, walnut display cases, a marble-topped counter — dates from the 1830s and looks like it belongs in a museum, except that people are sitting on it eating cream cakes and drinking coffee, which is exactly what they have been doing here for nearly two hundred years.

The confectionery was founded by Franz Schwabl and later taken over by Vilmos Ruszwurm, whose family ran it until the Communist era when, like everything else, it was nationalised. Somehow, the shop survived communism without being modernised, which is both its charm and its miracle. The dining room seats about twenty people, the kitchen is the size of a cupboard, and the line out the door on weekends can stretch halfway down the street.

The signature pastry is the Ruszwurm cream pastry — layers of flaky puff pastry with vanilla cream that has been made to the same recipe for generations. The dobos torta, the layered sponge cake with hard caramel top invented by Hungarian confectioner József Dobos in 1884, is another essential order. Empress Sisi of Austria was reportedly a regular customer, and whether or not that is true, it is the kind of place you can imagine an empress choosing.

In a city where café culture is practically a religion, Ruszwurm is the church. Skip the tourist-trap restaurants on Castle Hill and come here instead. The pastries are honest, the coffee is good, and the room itself is a two-hundred-year-old time capsule.