"People will read, not eat."
WHEN WE TOLD OUR FRIENDS and familythat we wanted to establish a restaurant where we would cook and serve food inspired by books, and that the place would be like a reading room or a library, or at least that we wanted to recreate that atmosphere with the furniture, many of them were worried about us, afraid, almost all of them said not to do it, it would be no good, we would disappoint our guests.
They were wrong.
People come, eat AND read.
We believed in ourselves and our idea.
Because we took it upon ourselves to cook what a book means to us. Of course, everyone has their own idea of what the pumpkin spice, butterbeer or dandelion juice concoction from the Harry Potter books might be like, and we might just make something different. Yet we think we'd be more disappointed if we tried to recreate the famous eating scenes from the books that were made into films.
People who come here for the first time often don't even know where they are. There are bookshelves everywhere, thousands of volumes in the restaurant's design. Combining reading and gastronomy is a new trend in hospitality. Meal time can also be used for spiritual nourishment. The books also send out the message that you don't have to rush here like in fast food. Book restaurants with their moderate prices are a kind of bourgeois, intellectual meeting place. But the Book Bar is different: a true Hungaricum, its basic idea a protected world patent. It is the only restaurant where the recipes are born from books.
