Café Gerbeaud

A confectionery house running since 1858

Cakes and chocolates have come out of this Budapest house since 1858, when Henrik Kugler opened the confectionery that later took the Gerbeaud name. The business moved to Vörösmarty Square in the downtown centre in 1870, and Emil Gerbeaud joined in 1884, took the shop over, kept the name and widened the assortment until it stood for Hungarian confectionery craft. What reads today as a landmark café is really several things at once: a pastry retail counter, a room for events, a meeting place, and a working confectionery built on Austro-Hungarian cakes, chocolates, candies and tea-service sweets.

The cakes that carry the name

The counter is deep rather than narrow. The classic cake side runs to Dobos torte, Esterházy torte, Sacher torte, krémes and the Gerbeaud slice, while the confectionery side keeps konyakmeggy, the cognac sour cherries, and macskanyelv, the cat’s tongues, alongside pralines, chocolates and biscuits. The historical line reaches back to Kugler’s Chinese and Russian teas and his ice creations, then forward through butter creams, Parisian crèmes, short cakes and kirsch candy. This is not a bread or croissant house. It is a sweets house built on cake, cream, chocolate and candy, and the pastry language it uses about itself, timeless classics beside newer creations, is a fair description of how the case actually reads.

The chocolates, pralines and candies are the part of the range that travels. They leave in boxes as often as the cakes arrive at tables, and they are the reason the shop still works as a confectionery rather than only as a café.

Plan the visit around a seated cake order

Service is seated café service rather than a takeaway counter, with guests shown to whatever table comes free in order of arrival. The room is part of the draw: crystal chandeliers, marble-topped tables and cherrywood panelling, a 1910 interior worked in marble, exotic woods, bronze and Rococo-style stucco, with chandeliers in the Maria Theresa manner. Ferenc Deák, Franz Liszt and Empress Elisabeth all sat here in the café’s earlier life, which is part of why it still reads as a landmark rather than as a pastry shop. The house also runs cultural programming now, from theatre and live music to talks, so the room has a second use in the evening.

For a focused first order, take one named cake, the Dobos, the Esterházy, the Sacher, a krémes or the Gerbeaud slice, then add konyakmeggy or macskanyelv for the smaller confectionery side of the house.