Szimpla Kert: What It Costs, and Why Nobody Agrees on the Opening Hours

Szimpla Kert is the most searched single venue in Budapest and one of the hardest to get a straight answer about. Ask when it opens and you will find four different times. Ask whether it costs anything to get in and you will find people selling you tickets to a place that is free. There is a reason for both, and it starts with the fact that Szimpla barely has a website.

Why nobody agrees on the opening hours

Every guide to Szimpla gives you opening hours and almost none of them match. We found one saying it opens at 15:00 on weekdays, a Reddit thread saying 16:00 most days, a TripAdvisor review recommending you arrive for the 15:00 opening, and another guide quoting midday. Closing is the one thing they broadly agree on, at 4am.

So we went to the source, and the source is the explanation. Szimpla does not publish its opening hours anywhere on its own website.

Their site is one background image. Clicking it takes you to a page of seven icons: drinks and food, concerts, resident artists, videos, the design shop, a Hungarian literature project, and a fire safety plan. The icon labelled Basic information, which is the one you would expect to hold the address and the hours, links straight out to a Google listing.

That is the whole story. There is no primary source for anyone to copy, so every writer has quoted whatever they saw on the night they went, or whatever the last guide said, and the numbers have drifted apart for twenty years.

What that means for you is simple and slightly annoying: check Google or their Facebook page on the day. We are not going to add a fifth set of invented hours to the pile. What we can tell you is the shape of it, which is consistent across every account: it opens in the afternoon, it is quiet until about nine, it is uncomfortably full from ten onwards on a weekend, and it runs very late.

Is it free, and what are those tickets?

Walking into Szimpla on a normal night costs nothing. There is no admission charge, no minimum spend and no obligation to buy anything at all. You can walk through the whole building, look at everything, and leave without opening your wallet.

Which makes it odd that one of the big booking platforms lists "Szimpla Kert tickets" from under four dollars, with a rating built on thousands of reviews. That is not a ticket to get in. Reading through what people describe buying, it resolves into two different things:

• A queue jump. On busy nights there is a line at the door, and around ten euros buys you past it. Worth it or not depends entirely on whether there is a queue when you arrive, and the most common piece of advice on the Budapest forums is blunt: if there is a queue, go somewhere else and come back.
• A pub crawl that stops at Szimpla. You are buying the guide, the group and the shots, and Szimpla is one venue on the route. That is a real product, just not an entry ticket.

One claim we could not stand up: at least one guide states that entry is free for women while men often report paying a cover charge. We found no official confirmation of that anywhere, and we are repeating it only so you know it is out there, unverified. If you are asked to pay to walk in on an ordinary night, that is worth questioning.

What a night actually costs

Szimpla does publish one thing properly, and it is the most useful document about the place: a fourteen-page PDF of the full drinks and food menu. Nobody quotes it, so here it is.

The spread in that table is the point, and it is wider than at any other bar you are likely to visit in Budapest. A cocktail costs 5,500 HUF and a beer costs 1,900. You are paying for almost three beers every time you order one drink. At around fifteen euros, the cocktails are priced like London or Paris, in a city where they should not be.

Meanwhile the cheapest thing on the menu is not the cheap beer. It is a glass of Hungarian wine at 1,200 HUF, about 3.30 euros, off a genuinely serious list of small Hungarian producers from Somlo, Tokaj, Badacsony and the Balaton uplands. It is a third of the price of the cocktail almost nobody skips.

So the practical answer to whether Szimpla is expensive is: entirely up to you, and most people choose wrong. Here are two evenings for two people, both perfectly normal orders, priced off the same menu.

Eighteen euros and seventy three euros, in the same building, on the same night, without anybody behaving extravagantly. The difference is almost entirely the cocktails.

Day and night are two different places

Compare that photograph with the one at the top of this page. Same courtyard, same furniture, same Trabant. One of them is a building you can look at and the other is a crowd you are standing in.

Szimpla is genuinely worth seeing as a piece of accidental architecture. The Trabant with a table growing out of it, the bathtub seating, the chairs bolted to the ceiling, the room where every surface is covered in dismantled electronics and old computer keyboards. None of that is visible at eleven at night with four hundred people in the way.

The move, if you have the time, is to go twice. Once in the afternoon, when you can walk the whole place, take the photographs, and have a beer sitting down for 1,900 forint. Once late, if the packed-out version is what you came for. If you only have one visit, go early evening: you get most of the atmosphere and can still see the building.

Pub crawls: what you are actually buying

Since Szimpla itself has nothing to sell you, the commercial layer around it is pub crawls, and they split into two products aimed at completely different people. Worth knowing which one you are looking at before you book.

Best evidence of the crawls

Budapest Original Ruin Pub Crawl Including 5 Shots

★★★★★4.7 · 542 reviews

Five hours, several ruin bars, five shots included and a guide who gets you past the doors. We show this one because it has by far the strongest evidence of the crawls we found: 4.78 across 542 reviews, where the higher-rated alternatives rest on 15 and 31. Be clear about what it is, though. This is a night out with a group of strangers in their twenties, not a tour of the Jewish Quarter, and you will not be looking at the architecture.

from €18.03

per person, 5 hours

Check availability→

The opposite product

Budapest Ruin Bars Evening Walking Tour with Drinks and Street Food

★★★★★4.8 · 137 reviews

Three hours rather than five, with drinks and street food, guided around the Jewish Quarter. It costs roughly six times the shot crawl and attracts a completely different person: this is for wanting to understand the district and why the ruin bars ended up in it. The 4.85 rests on 137 reviews, a smaller sample than the crawl above but a good score, and the recurring praise is for the guides.

from €105

per person, 3 hours

Check availability→

If neither appeals, you genuinely do not need either. Szimpla is a five-minute walk from Deak Ferenc ter, entry is free, and the other ruin bars are on the surrounding streets. The crawl buys you company and momentum, not access.

The Sunday farmers market

On Sunday mornings the courtyard becomes a farmers market, with small Hungarian producers selling honey, cheese, jam, bread and vegetables. It is run as a proper market, not a themed event for tourists, and it is part of a wider set of community things Szimpla hosts alongside the bar: film screenings, live music, an art gallery, a lending library on Kazinczy street and a bicycle flea market.

It is also, for our money, the most interesting time to see the building. You get the architecture in daylight, the courtyard full for a reason that has nothing to do with drinking, and a version of Szimpla that looks like the neighbourhood project it started as rather than the attraction it became.

Queues, security and what catches people out

Szimpla is at Kazinczy utca 14, in District VII, the Jewish Quarter, about ten minutes on foot from Deak Ferenc ter. The frontage is deliberately unremarkable, so look for the queue rather than a sign.

• There is a security check at the door. Szimpla's own house rules warn that you may be searched, bags and clothing included. It is quick, but it is why the queue moves the way it does.
• Cards are fine, and you will want one. The bars are separate counters in different rooms, and paying in cash across several of them is slower.
• You will lose your group. It is not one room, it is a warren over two floors with several bars, and this is the single most repeated experience in the reviews. Agree a meeting point before you go in.
• Different rooms, different queues. The main courtyard bar is the busiest. Walking thirty seconds further into the building often halves the wait.
• If there is a queue outside, come back. This is the standing advice on the Budapest forums and it is better than paying to skip it, because the queue is a symptom of how full it is inside.

Is it a tourist trap?

Yes, and it is also worth going. Those two things are not in conflict, and pretending otherwise is how most writing about Szimpla goes wrong in one direction or the other.

The case for the prosecution is real. It is overwhelmingly touristy, the Hungarians you meet there mostly work there, it is unpleasantly crowded for several hours every evening, and the cocktail pricing is aimed squarely at people who are not counting.

The case for going is also real. This is the building that invented the entire form. It is genuinely extraordinary to walk through, the way a good junk shop is extraordinary, and no reproduction of the idea elsewhere in Europe comes close. Entry costs nothing, so the only thing you are risking is the time. And the market on Sunday and the concerts during the week are not tourist theatre.

Our verdict: go, early, and treat it as a building rather than a bar. Have one beer or a glass of the Hungarian wine while you look at it. Then walk five minutes and drink somewhere with room to sit down.

If Szimpla is too much

The good news is that the Jewish Quarter is full of alternatives within a few streets, and several of them are better places to actually spend an evening. Some are quieter versions of the same idea, some are barely ruin bars at all despite the label, and at least one that guides still list has been closed since 2020.

We compare them all, with addresses, real opening hours and an honest note on which ones are not what they claim, in the guide to Budapest ruin bars. If you would rather see the city than drink in it, the Danube cruise is the other thing worth doing after dark, and the things to do guide weighs Szimpla against everything else Budapest asks you to pay for.

Frequently asked questions

Some links on this page are affiliate links. If you book through them we earn a commission at no extra cost to you. It does not change what we recommend. Full disclosure.