New York Café: What It Really Costs, and What You Cannot Book

Four of the first fifteen results for this place are people asking whether it is worth it: a full review titled exactly that, a Facebook thread, a Reddit thread and a blog asking the same. It is the most doubted attraction in Budapest, and the doubt usually gets answered with an opinion.

The café publishes its menu as a 38-page PDF, which is why almost nobody quotes real figures from it. We read it. There are two things in there that change the arithmetic and neither is in the prices you see.

Looking at it is free

This is a café inside a hotel, not a museum. There is no ticket and no admission charge. You can walk through the door, stand in the entrance, look up at the ceiling for as long as it takes, and leave without ordering anything.

That single fact reframes the entire "is it worth it" question, because the thing people actually come for is the room, and the room is free. What costs money is sitting down in it.

If you want to look without paying, go early. It opens at 07:00 every day of the week, and the first hour is the only time the place resembles the photographs.

What you can and cannot book

Here is the rule, in the café's own words: table reservation is only available for dinners after 6pm. During 7am to 6pm the seating is in order upon arrival.

So there is no skip-the-line ticket to buy for the daytime, whatever anyone sells you. Between seven in the morning and six in the evening you join the queue like everyone else. Reservations open a month ahead, and the café takes bookings of up to ten people.

There is one way around it that very few guides mention. The White Salon, on the gallery above the café inside the Anantara hotel, does take reservations for lunch between 12:00 and 17:00, with limited seating, and for dinner from 18:00 to 23:00. If you want a guaranteed daytime seat in this building, that is the door.

One live exception, and it may not last. As of 16 September 2026, the café's own history page carries a notice saying it will be possible to reserve a table for breakfast and lunch throughout September. That directly contradicts the standing policy on its reservation page, and the notice does not say whether it continues. Check the reservation page before you rely on it.

What it actually costs

Every page of the menu carries the same line in small print: a 15 percent service charge will be added to your bill. None of the prices below include it, so here is the arithmetic done properly.

So the honest headline is that the cheapest realistic sit-down, a coffee and a slice of cake, is about 26 euros. An espresso on its own, if all you want is to occupy a chair for twenty minutes, is about 9.35.

And there is a second thing in that menu worth knowing. Every item is printed with both a forint and a euro price, and we checked the implied rate across five different items. It is exactly 350 forints to the euro every time, from the 2,975 espresso to the 22,400 birthday cake.

The real rate is about 366. The menu itself says the euro prices are "only normative" and that the bill is issued in forints. The practical upshot: the euro column runs roughly 5 percent above what you will actually pay, so read the forint column and pay in forints. If a card terminal offers to charge you in euros, decline it, which is good advice everywhere in Hungary and specifically useful here.

One small trap for anyone who does not drink dairy: oat or almond milk adds 525 HUF to any coffee.

Is it worth it?

We have not sat down here, so we are not going to review the cake. What we can do is frame the decision with the numbers above, because the question is not really about coffee.

Arguments for going in and sitting down: the room is not overhyped. It is a genuinely extraordinary piece of nineteenth-century interior architecture and the photographs undersell the ceiling. Twenty-six euros for an hour in it is not outrageous when a mediocre museum ticket in this city is fifteen.

Arguments against: you are paying restaurant prices for café items, the service charge means the advertised price is not the price, you will very likely queue, and the room at the hour you can get in is full of other people doing exactly what you are doing. If what you wanted was a quiet coffee in a beautiful place, this is not that.

The middle path, which we think is the sensible one: go at seven in the morning, walk in, look at the room properly for free, and then decide on the spot whether you want to give it an hour and 26 euros. You cannot make that judgement from a photograph and you do not have to commit before you have seen it.

Why the room looks like that

It was never built as a café. The building was the Budapest headquarters of the New York insurance company, and the café occupied its ground floor. The architect was Alajos Hauszmann, working with Flóris Korb and Kálmán Giergl, in the eclectic style that was fashionable in Budapest at the end of the nineteenth century. The spiralled marble columns and the brass figures are from that original scheme, including a figure of El Asmodai, placed as the spirit of coffee and of thinking, to inspire the writers.

And it worked, which is the part that makes the place more than decoration. This was the headquarters of Hungarian literary life for decades. Mihály Babits, Géza Gárdonyi, Frigyes Karinthy, Dezső Kosztolányi, Gyula Illyés and Sándor Weöres all worked here. A Pál utcai fiúk, The Paul Street Boys, the Hungarian novel every schoolchild reads, was written in this room. Sándor Márai's line about the place was that there is no literature without a café.

The detail that gives you the flavour of it: writers could ask the waiters for pen, ink and paper, free. The practice was eventually stopped, and the reason recorded by the novelist Gyula Krúdy was that Karinthy had spilled the ink on the grey sofa.

Hours, address and getting there

It stands on the Grand Boulevard in District VII, which puts it about ten minutes on foot from the ruin bars and the Jewish Quarter. That is the natural pairing: the café in the morning when it is quiet, the same district in the evening when it is not.

Because the café takes its own reservations directly and free of charge, there is nothing to book through anyone else, and we found no third-party product worth recommending. If you want a table, go to the café's own site. For where this fits into a day, see the Budapest itinerary, and for how it ranks against the other paid interiors in the city, things to do in Budapest.

Frequently asked questions