TRAVELING IN STYLE : Prime Time in Budapest : On Both Sides of the Danube, the Hungarian Capital Echoes With the Past--and Glows With the Season

IN LATE SPRING, THE CLIMATE OF LANDlocked Hungary has a Mediterranean tinge to it. By the beginning of May in Budapest, the trees are already in full leaf, the streets and avenues are flecked with green and gold, and the air is liquid and sweet, despite the pollution that often hangs like a veil over much of the city. The terraces of the cafes and restaurants have opened, and it is pleasant to sit outside at almost any time of day.

Today, most of the people sitting on those terraces will be tourists. The inhabitants of Budapest today lead lives that are too harried for dallying in such places. That was not so two or three generations ago. At the beginning of this century there were no less than 600 coffeehouses in Budapest--and there were very few tourists. Budapest was a modern city then. Foreign visitors were surprised to find, east of Vienna, a metropolis with luxurious hotels, fine shops, smartly dressed men and women, wide, long boulevards, and new buildings by the hundreds.

Today, most of Budapest still looks like a turn-of-the-century city--a fact that charms its visitors, perhaps, but not necessarily its inhabitants. True, there are a few new postmodern office buildings and ultramodern hotels around the city (the latter with all the amenities of such establishments in, say, Berlin or Brussels, and with solicitous staffs of a kind all but obsolete in most other places). However, a vast number, perhaps the majority, of the residents of Budapest live in apartment houses built 80 to 120 years ago. They know, and experience every day, how run-down they are--while foreigners, passing through, find these sooty petrifications of a Central European bourgeois civilization to be attractive. Those chiseled and carved portals, those muscular caryatids holding up balustraded stone balconies, those quadrangular towers atop some of the buildings, are small monuments of artisanry and handiwork. One hundred years ago, those rows of buildings were assertively new. Now they belong to an age long past, which is their great appeal--from the outside.

BUDAPEST: BUDA AND PEST. THESE WERE ONCE TWO separate towns, two municipalities on opposite sides of the Danube, united only in 1873, 24 years after the first permanent span, the Lanchid or Chain Bridge, had connected them. Buda is hill and dale; Pest is entirely flat. Buda was traditionally German-inhabited, conservative, Catholic, agricultural. Pest was Magyar, rebellious, radical, a market town, with a considerable Protestant, and later Jewish, population. In the 19th Century, Pest overtook Buda demographically, politically, culturally, architecturally.

In 1890, only one of every four inhabitants of the city lived in Buda. Pest was more fashionable, a fact that one may sense today ambling around what was then its most elegant residential quarter, full of turn-of-the-century villas reminiscent of the Belle Epoque mansions found in the suburbs of Paris or around the Retiro in Madrid. Things are different now. Those who have a choice prefer to live in Buda, and the population of the two halves of the city is now almost even.

Those hills of Buda--cascading down toward the river in an irregular and asymmetrical fugue, their crests punctuated by clumps of houses--are enticing, particularly in the spring and summer. (Some of them are more than hills; the highest one is nearly 1,600 feet high.) In May, the air--always more salubrious here than in Pest--may be warm enough to let the visitor sit outside late into the evening, on a park bench or in an outdoor restaurant, and watch the slow brightening of lights in windows across the river in Pest, together with the sudden coruscation of the brilliant electric garland that traces the classical outline of the Chain Bridge.

Or, descending from the slopes of Buda, the visitor might walk across the Margaret Bridge and pause for a moment to lean over its ugly French-Victorian railing. From there, the slow curve of the Danube is such that one can see, reflected in the dark flowing water, the floodlighted monumental buildings on Castle Hill, the immense and ornate Parliament and the glittering Chain Bridge garland, all at once. It is one of the great cityscapes in the world.

BUDAPEST IS NOT A VERY OLD CITY, WITH A FEW EXceptions. One of these is Varhegy or Castle Hill, in Buda--a plateau occupied by the first citizens of Buda as early as the 13th Century. The Hill--from portions of which, thank God, automobile traffic is now excluded--is the site of the city’s Royal Palace and many other notable structures, including numerous museums. Most tourists are driven up to Castle Hill in buses for the view, to gaze down on Pest from the white parapets of a strange serpentine breastwork, the so-called Fishermen’s Bastion (which, despite its medieval look, was built between 1890 and 1905). That view is grand rather than beautiful.

The more wondrous thing to do is to walk along the district’s curving narrow streets, stopping to look into the doorways and the inner courtyards of the 18th-Century houses (most of them rebuilt after the 1945 Russian siege of the German-occupied city, when more than 80% of them were destroyed or damaged). There is the palpable presence and smell of a peculiarly Hungarian past here, embedded in Baroque houses that are simpler and more provincial and, therefore, more restrained than the great Baroque buildings of Vienna or Prague. This part of the city is especially beautiful in May and June, with vivid green shadows everywhere in the courtyards and on the Castle Walk, the Italianate western parapet of Castle Hill looking out to the Buda hills--a corso nobile beneath the plane and acacia trees and the Biedermeier windows.

The other main historic district of the city, not as old as Castle Hill but old enough, is on the Pest side--the so-called Inner City, most of it between the Chain and the Elizabeth bridges. (All seven of the bridges crossing the Danube in Budapest are modern re-creations; the originals were all blown up by the retreating Germans in January, 1945.) This area is full of lovely late-Empire and early-Biedermeier buildings, some of them erected as late as the 1860s, beautifully proportioned and now restuccoed and exuding an air of patrician comfort. In late spring, their facades are washed by a benevolent morning light, and for long hours afterward their rows of windows are ablush with the westering sun as it moves over the Danube toward Buda.

BUDAPEST IS AN EASY CITY TO get around in. Public transportation is quite good, and is hospitable to the visitor. Taxis are plentiful; fares have been rising lately, but are still reasonable. (Visitors should avoid the large-sized taxis, mostly Mercedes-Benzes, lined up before the luxury hotels ready to swallow innocent tourists; their meters are often set to run three times faster than normal.)

The city is also hospitable to boulevardiers, with its long avenues and riverside promenades. The streets are well-lighted at night, and at least the main ones are fairly safe. The major shopping street, Vaci Utca, and Vorosmarty Ter, the square that opens up at one end of it, are closed to cars and full of pedestrians. Elsewhere, walking is not without its obstacles. There are the serried rows of automobiles parked aslant the pavements of some of the narrow side streets, and, on the shopping streets of Pest’s Inner City, there are feral-faced money-changers forever sidling up to one (to be avoided at all costs). These are new developments.

Not a new development, but rather a lamentable custom surviving from the past, is the presence of Gpsy orchestras in many of the restaurants. To an excess of plucking and planging and pleading and twanging, the chief violinist and accordionist inevitably approach each table of unsure tourists with an expression of suggestion and intimidation, prospecting for a generous tip.

Apart from that, Budapest restaurants can be quite pleasant. Hungarian cuisine is not French or Northern Italian, but it does belong among the best second-rank cuisines of the world, and is definitely closer to Western than to other Eastern European cooking. Except for its fish dishes, though--especially Hungary’s famous fogas, the most exquisite freshwater fish in the world--most Hungarian food is frankly rather heavy. That doesn’t mean that it is soggy or flour-laden; to the contrary, it is pleasingly light on the palate despite its richness--which is where the trouble comes from. Haute cuisine is rare in Budapest today, but it exists. The great and newly restored Gundel restaurant is both opulent and restrained, its decor in perfect accord with its traditions of fine food and service, which date back nearly 100 years.

THERE ARE MANY MUSEUMS IN Budapest--the best picture gallery being that of the Szepmuveszeti Muzeum or Museum of Fine Arts, near the entrance to the City Park, with an excellent, eclectic collection, particularly strong in Dutch and Italian Renaissance works. Also worth visiting are the Castle Museum, Hungarian National Gallery (displaying paintings by the finest Hungarian artists of several periods) and the Hungarian National Library, all on Castle Hill, in different wings of the former Royal Palace.

The State Opera House has been refurbished beautifully, down to the 1884-style lettering of the inscriptions. It is a jewel box inside, better proportioned than the Opera in Vienna, with much plum-colored plush and a fine orchestra. There is also a City Operetta Theater, which happens to cater to one of my weaknesses--Hungarian musicals from the early part of this century. The compositions are excellent, often better than the schmaltzy harmonies of Franz Lehar, at times approximating the early Jerome Kern. This orchestra, too, is superb, though when you sit in one of the front rows you might see an oboist or a flutist idly reading the Sunday sports pages. And though the production often reaches pre-war Broadway standards, the waists of some of the performers are a bit thick. Never mind. The dusty plush and the sweet-bitter music--yes, sweet-bitter, the reverse of bittersweet, which is what Hungarian confectionary is like, too--leave a haunting aftertaste.

May and June are also the best months for arts lovers in Budapest. Many concerts, operas, ballets and theater performances are held then, some in open air, some in English. Hotel rooms are furnished with pamphlets detailing events for The Month or The Week in Budapest.

Well, a month in Budapest may be a bit too much--and a week, especially in the spring, may not be enough--my last advice to Americans about to visit my native city.

Oscar Wilde once said, “It is always a silly thing to give advice, but to give good advice is absolutely fatal.” Perhaps. But Wilde would have liked Budapest. I can imagine him bellowing with pleasure as the waiters pile unaccustomed dishes and bottles of agreeable wine before him and his friends in an open-air restaurant on a soft May evening, with a few stars twinkling through the dark canopy of the acacia trees in the courtyard.

GUIDEBOOK: The Budapest File

Telephone numbers and prices: The country code for Hungary is 36; the city code for Budapest is 1. All prices are approximate and are computed at a rate of 80 forints to the dollar. Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

Getting there: There are no nonstop flights between Los Angeles and Budapest, but frequent connecting flights are offered on Delta, SAS, Swissair, Lufthansa, American Airlines, TWA and KLM. Both Delta and Malev, the Hungarian national carrier, offer nonstop flights from New York to Budapest every Saturday.

Where to stay: Hotel Forum, Apaczai Csere Janos Utca 12-14, telephone 117-8088, for U.S. reservations (800) 327-0200. A popular, well-equipped business-oriented hotel (said to resemble an upended tape recorder) that overlooks the Danube and the Chain Bridge. Rates: $200-$240. Grand Hotel Corvinus Kempinski, Erzsebet Ter 7-8, tel. 266-1000; U.S. reservations (800) 426-3135. The newest and most elaborate luxury hotel in town, complete with architecturally significant lobby, fitness center, 24-hour room service and jazz nightly in the bar. Rates: $250-$300. Budapest Hilton, Hess Andras Ter 1-3, tel. 175-1000, U.S. reservations (800) HILTONS (445-8667). A well-appointed international-style hostelry on Castle Hill, incorporating parts of an old Dominican church and cloister within its walls. It offers great views of the city, with the Fishermen’s Bastion just next door. Rates: $180-$240. Hotel Gellert, Gellert Ter 1, tel. 185-2200, fax 166-6631. An impressive Art Nouveau monument perched above the Danube, with a huge open-air swimming pool and famous mineral baths. The rooms are plain and rather tired. Rates: $160-$170.

Where to eat: Gundel, Allatkerti Ut 2, Varosliget (City Park), tel. 121-3550. The showplace restaurant in Budapest today, a legendary establishment revived with great flair by Hungarian-born American restaurateur George Lang. Reservations essential; dinner, $90. Legradi Testverek, Magyar Utca 23, tel. 118-6804. French-influenced Hungarian cuisine, with Chippendale chairs and Herend china, at this tiny but highly fashionable restaurant; $60. Kacsa, Fo Utca 75, tel. 135-3357. A small selection of well-prepared Hungarian and miscellaneous Continental dishes, with good service and pleasant piano music; $45.

For further information: Ibusz Hungarian Travel Co., 1 Parker Plaza, Suite 1104, Ft. Lee, N.J. 07024; (201) 592-8585.