Beyond the Decor: Rich Fare From Hungary

“This is the best stuffed cabbage I’ve ever had,” I told the cash register guy.

“I know,” he said.

It was a Saturday night, and Csardas Hungarian Restaurant was jumping. Saturday dinner and Sunday brunch are all-you-can-eat buffets, and the sound of the Hungarian language, rolling around in diners’ mouths as if the vowels themselves tasted good, practically drowned out the Europop soundtrack.

From the outside, Csardas looks like an old nursery or flower shop hastily converted into a restaurant. It pretty much looks like that on the inside too. There are two rooms, a sort of roofed patio with booths and tables and a stage (though I happen never to have seen any live entertainment there), which opens on a comically small parking lot, and a long, narrow inside dining room lined with mirror tiles and posters of Hungary.

So it’s not exactly a place to take people you want to impress, unless they’re impressed with rich, meaty, spicy Hungarian food. And lots of it, particularly when that buffet is going on.

Not that you don’t get a lot to eat the rest of the week. On other nights, the owner is likely to circulate in the mirror room, handing out tiny cheese muffins called turos pogacsa (the name comes from the Italian “focaccia” by way of Turkish, suggesting how thoroughly Hungarian cooks Hungarianize foreign influences).

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And the regular menu dishes are generous. The roast pork is five or six slices of fairly moist pork with plenty of red cabbage and potato chunks fried golden and crunchy. Vadas is sliced beef with the mushy texture and vinegar tang of sauerbraten, but in an arresting yellow-orange sauce (the waiter says the color is due to mustard, but it tastes like horseradish to me). Planted in this orange sea is a row of herbed dumplings.

Bakonyi szelet is the Hungarian cousin of porc chasseur, only the generous mushroom sauce on the pork chops is made with sour cream and a sharp dash of hot paprika. It comes with a meadow of tiny spaetzle-like dumplings.

For the buffet, they set up a battery of steam tables on the pastry counter near the entrance. A lot of the dishes that show up there are regular menu items, including that wonderful stuffed cabbage. The cabbage rolls come with golden sauerkraut, almost sweet, and have a subtle, haunting herbal perfume--dill and summer savory?

But I don’t find the layered potatoes on the regular menu. This casserole, with a name like a character in a video game (rakott krumpli), is sliced potatoes layered with cheese, hard-boiled eggs and a few bits of an intense sausage-like smoky salami. It’s strictly professionalism that has kept me from filling up my plate with nothing but stuffed cabbage and layered potatoes when I’ve been to the buffet.

Pork ribs show up on the buffet steam tables in much the same sauce as the stuffed cabbage. And usually there’s a lighter, sweetish, noodle-based cousin of the layered potatoes with much less cheese. You might find a pilaf-like dish of meat and rice, or some plainer dishes, like basic fried chicken and a pork schnitzel (a bit dry, if you ask me). Often there’s chicken in a rather watery paprika sauce.

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There are always two soups, one of which is likely to be a thin cauliflower soup that tastes as if there are mushrooms in it somewhere. There are even some vegetables among all the meat-and-potatoes stuff, such as stewed peppers (lecso) or stuffed peppers in quite sweet tomato sauce. If you see a puffy-looking flatbread, put some of the accompanying garlic sauce on it--it’s wonderfully aromatic but not harsh.

The desserts include strudels (apple and a powerful poppy seed strudel) and crepes (palacsinta) with fillings such as candied walnuts or apricot jam. There are very rich petits fours-like cakes: a multilayered chestnut cake with a whiff of kirsch, or two dryish chocolate cake layers with an inch-thick filling of chocolate mousse.

The wildest is szilvas gomboc, a chewy plum-filled dumpling crusted with sweet toasted crumbs and served warm, so it shows up at the buffet on the steam tables, where you might not expect a sweet. If you order it at dinner, it comes with a pile of what are, in effect, sweet gnocchi. It’ll probably be the best szilvas gomboc you’ve ever had.

BE THERE

Csardas Hungarian Restaurant, 5820 Melrose Ave., Hollywood. (323) 962-6434. 11:30 a.m.-10 p.m. daily. Beer and wine. Street parking, tiny lot. All major cards. Dinner for two, food only, $24-$37 (buffet, $26).

What to Get: layered potatoes, stuffed cabbage, roast pork, bakonyi szelet, szilvas gomboc, chestnut cake.