RESTAURANT REVIEW : Hortobagy’s Fare Stakes Out a Bit of Transylvania

Something must have been very wrong with Count Dracula. Why else would a landed nobleman living in a country blessed with richly satisfying cooking have developed a taste for human blood? Worse yet, he made a laughingstock of his Transylvanian homeland.

Transylvania (since World War I a part of Romania) is no laughing matter at Hortobagy (hor-toe-bazh) Hungarian restaurant in Studio City. Transylvanian goulash and Transylvanian flekken are prominent on this venerable restaurant’s menu.

Hortobagy has been serving reliable Hungarian peasant cooking for a long time--I’ve even written appreciatively about it, though some years ago. In the intervening flood of restaurant developments, however, I’d forgotten about it. But there it is still, now huddling next to a multistory office building where you navigate the big curve on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City. After so many years and so many changes in eating habits, it hadn’t seemed possible that it could still exist.

Entering its pristine interior did nothing to alleviate my fear that the whole experience was a dream, that if I spoke, the peasant decor would turn to stark white and the food to dust. Far from it. Although the maternal waitress who once picked up my plate, looked at it, put it down and said, “Eat your potatoes!” is gone, little else seems to have changed.

The prices are low, as always. Most lunch entrees are $5.25, and dinners (including a four-course prix fixe dinner) are about $9.80. Hard as this is to believe, it’s harder still to believe that the food, on the whole, is really good, and the portions large. This might be among the last of the inexpensive homey ethnic restaurants that once bridged the culinary gap between bland American cooking and pretentious French cuisine.

At Hortobagy, it was comforting to rediscover among the appetizers the savory red cabbage vitalized with caraway seeds, vinegar, black pepper and brown sugar. I liked it so much that it stayed on the table through the main course so I could dip into it from time to time as a condiment. It goes well with everything on the menu. The cucumber salad--cucumber slices, with onion in vinegar--though refreshing, was awfully tame by comparison. And although there was nothing wrong with the chopped liver, it was as flat as an unseasoned egg salad, which it resembled.

The prix fixe dinner is characteristic of a meal at Hortobagy. After the red cabbage comes a plate overflowing with meat and potatoes. In this case, the meat is two generous slices of richly flavored marinated roast pork. The potatoes are also unexpectedly flavorsome, infused, I imagine, with meat juices and black pepper. Included in the dinner is a palacsinta and coffee. Palacsinta is an egg-batter crepe offered with apricot jam filling with or without ground walnuts and sugar. Either way, it is a memorable dessert, one which might well bring you back for more.

The main dishes are meats either roasted, breaded with a light hand or served with a fairly delicate cream sauce. The roast duck, half a bird, was almost painfully plain, but crisp and moist nonetheless. There are various breaded veal and pork cutlets, and the cream-sauced dishes are the goulashes. They are not stews as we usually think of them (except for the goulash soup), but rather good-sized tender chunks of veal waiting to be broken open and washed with the surrounding rich sauce. Uncharacteristically, among generally moist meats, the sliced veal was dry, unlike the Transylvanian flekken , which unites a pork cutlet with the potatoes and red cabbage whose marinade permeates the meat.

These dishes were basically the sustenance of herdsmen on the vast Hortobagy plain. A fitting tribute to those hearty eaters is Hortobagy’s wood platter, mounded with enough food to more than satisfy two tired road jockeys worn out from wrangling Colts and Mustangs on the Ventura Freeway.

Counting from top to bottom, it consists of a rasher of crisp bacon, a large sausage, two deep-fried mushroom caps, two large deep-fried meat loaf croquettes so well-spiced and textured I thought that they were sausages, a pork chop, two pieces of fried liver and two breaded veal cutlets, all mounded on top of copious portions of potatoes, red cabbage and rice cooked in broth. Except for the liver, which had its life cooked out of it, this daunting display of excess (at the most unexcessive price of $22.80 for two people) was so tasty that two urban eaters finished it off with gusto.

For dessert, the palacsinta was even better than I remembered. The other desserts, alas, have not worn well over the years. Plum dumplings, once an amazing confection (of steamed potato dough filled with dark plum jam), were soggy and over-sweet. The mocha torte was no longer the light-textured cream-filled cake I remembered, although it still looked like a mini-terry cloth bath towel draped over its plate.

Like many national cuisines, Hungary’s is far more complex than one restaurant can offer. Although Hortobagy offers only the hearty type of Hungarian cooking (I am still waiting for fish, goose and fruit dishes), it’s one of the best restaurant values in the city and I’m very glad it’s still there.

Eat your heart out, Count Dracula.

Recommended dishes: goulash soup, $5.90; wood plate (for two), $22.80; palacsinta , $1.50.

Hortobagy, 11138 Ventura Blvd., Studio City. (818) 980-2273. Open noon to 10 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. Beer and wine. Cash only. Parking lot. Dinner for two, food only, $20-$35.