Today it is very simple to find a fast food restaurant in Budapest. In the past it was not the same. For example, the opening of the McDonald’s in the city in the last years of the communism was a real sensation. (1988, photograph: fortepan.hu)

It was a spring afternoon, when a friend of mine said: hey let’s go to the city center. It was a very familiar sentence in our young community. We all were just seventeen or eigthteen, we had been learning in a secondary school and we lived in a suburb of Budapest. We always went into the city. As an everage teenager at any time and in any part of the word, we also liked walking around in the crowded streeets of the citiy center, meeting friends, girls and eating out in cool places.

 And what we had seen at the very first time in our life, in this afternoon, that was really cool. I have almost forget it: it happend in the late 80’s, exactly in 1988.

 They were Crazy for the Coke

 For that kind of guys, who we were in these times, I mean, girls and boys in a small country of the communist block, America sybolised the freedom. We were interested in the whole Western world, but becouse of the movies, the world-famous pop stars, the US was the Promised Land. We knew just a very thin slice of the American culture but we wanted it all.

The biginning of the cult in Hungary. An advert, 1973 (Photograph: fortepan.hu)

We lived in an isolated, false universe, but we hearded of the main icons: cola, hot dog, hamburger, rock and roll, Hollywood and we thought, these all together are America. We thought, to be in possession of these icons is the the freedom. And we had a desire for the freedom. When the Coce was presented for the Hungarian customers at the HUNGEXPO in 1967, people were crazy for it. As if they would had got America in a small bottle.

 Hot Dog Years, Burger Age

 I remember, the hot dog was well-known in Hungary in my childood, at the end of the 70’s. And the decade of the 80’s was the ’hamburger age’ in this country. Street vendors, buffets and canteens offered it and a new variant came into being: meat, cheese, bacon, tomato, green salad and mixed pickles in a bun and we put mustard and ketcup onto it. I know, it seems ugly, but it was very delicious.

The heroic age of the street food in Hungary. Street vendors, 1979 (Photograph: fortepan.hu)

Fast and Cool

 In that spring afternoon in 1988, me and my friends went to the McDonald’s. It was a brand-new restaurant in the Régiposta utca (Régiposta Street) next to the Váci utca (Váci Street), what always has been the most representative shopping street of the city center of Budapest. Yes, the McDonald’s was a unique for the Hungarians, people were standing in a long line in front of the entrance.

We celebrated the start of the ’McDonaldization’.

 The first restaurant became a cool place very soon. Nowadays it is unimaginable, there are fast food bars, buffets, bistros in every corner of the city. But I recommend you tasting the dishes of the Hungarian cuisine, when you came to this counrty. To have something local is the best choice everytime.

Everybody wanted to taste Amerika (1988, Photograph: fortepan.hu)

At the time of the opening more of the employed were foreinger, they trained the Hungarians (1988, Photograph: fortepan.hu