Wiener Dude

Csardas is the strangest new place on Melrose, a twinkling fairyland just past the point where the traffic narrows to a single lane near Vine, a Hungarian country inn in a former taco stand on the edge of a neighborhood that seems less Hungarian and less rustic than perhaps anywhere on earth. Skeins of tiny Christmas bulbs flash on and off outside the restaurant; a powerful green strobe light pulses; a waterfall pounds into a serene concrete pool. The L-shaped parking lot, newly paved with brick, seems especially designed to accommodate as few cars as possible. An enormous American Colonial bug zapper glows silently purple in the insect-free autumn dark.

Inside the restaurant, past the display of Hungarian crockery and the flyers advertising bargain flights to Budapest, past the clean, rich aroma of freshly made pastry cream, the dining room is long and narrow as a plush railroad car, rows of small booths on either side. Hungarian travel posters (the Nine Holed Bridge of Hortobagy), more Christmas lights and back-lit “stained glass” line the walls. Beer is served in Montreal Expos souvenir glasses. The most popular appetizer is an orange cheese ball.

And in the back of the place, behind a console of electric keyboards, a bearded organist plays sad Hungarian songs morphing into Broadway kitsch, “Sunrise Sunset” backed with strumming banjos as if it were by Stephen Foster, the “Blue Danube” coming in and out like some dimly remembered Angelo Badalamente score, and always Liszt’s greatest hits, at least the parts before the tricky runs come in.

“Tell me, tell me,” he says. “What would you like to hear most.”

“Umm,” says my friend, “I love cabaret music.”

The organist scratches his head, hums a little to himself, sits suddenly upright as if a brilliant idea has come into his head. And with a crash and a flourish, he launches into the theme song from the musical “Cabaret,” beaming as furiously as if he’d made it up himself.

It is often said that Hungarian food has little to do with goulash, that a truly cosmopolitan Budapest guy has probably never seen the dish outside the context of a country inn. But though it may well specialize in dense, intensely garlicky roast pork, crisply fried Wiener schnitzel or crisp, though dry, roast duck, Csardas (which in fact is the Hungarian word for “country inn”) has loads of the stuff: savory veal goulash stewed with peppers and onions, Transylvanian veal goulash with stewed cabbage, tasty pork goulash.

Goulashes are served with the tiny Hungarian dumplings called csipetki , the traditional accompaniment, and like good home cooking, they lack the gut-busting heaviness you might associate with Southland Hungarian food. And though most of the “goulashes” here are technically “ porkolts ,” which is to say more like stews than soup, the goulash soup, a hearty, tomato-based beef potage served in a burnished table-size kettle that swings on a wrought-iron stand, is both delicious and authentic.

Chicken paprikas is a tender half-bird in a ruddy, sour cream-thickened sauce; bakonyi szelet is two rather toughened fried pork chops blanketed in 40-weight mushroom gravy. Vadas , which is sort of the Hungarian equivalent of the sweet-sour German pot roast Sauerbraten , revolves around dryish slabs of meat, but it includes a delicious, pumpkin-colored sauce and three delicious, fluffy bread dumplings flecked with fresh herbs. The farmer’s plate might be as close as it is possible to come in America to a Hungarian rustic feast: grilled garlic sausage, Hungarian roast pork and a great heap of crusty sauteed potatoes, supplemented with a kettle of the goulash soup, a perfect Hungarian country meal for two.

Desserts include rich dobos tortes, bready plum dumplings and an ultra-chocolate thing called somloi galuska , but what you want is the Hungarian dessert crepe, palacsinta , wrapped around a filling of candied walnuts or sweet farmer’s cheese.

* Csardas Hungarian Restaurant

5820 Melrose Ave., Los Angeles, (213) 962-6434. Open daily 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Lot parking. Beer and wine. Takeout. MasterCard and Visa accepted. Dinner for two, food only, $18-$30.