In
most cities the modus operandi when searching for a raucous night out
in the latest trendy bar is to hit the main strip and look for the
brightest lights. Not so in Budapest.
In Hungary's capital city, the best places are secreted up side
streets in rundown districts, thrown together in the courtyards of
abandoned buildings or even slapped onto the roof of crumbling
communist-era shopping centres.
These bars form part of Budapest's ever-mutating kert
(garden) bar scene, which survives the complaints of cantankerous old
neighbours and the attentions of developers by throwing up new bars
each spring to replace those that close down.
The recipe for a kert is simple: find an available space,
hastily jam in a bar area serving cheap beer, choose all kinds of
random junk to decorate the area and then wait for the punters to come
in.
While the scene continuously morphs, the bar that more or less
created the blueprint for the others that followed has somehow managed
to remain in the same place.
Halfway up Kazinczy utca in the crumbling Jewish quarter, the only
clue to Szimpla Kert's existence is a small, faded sign and a bouncer
perched on a stool outside the kind of tattered building you would
expect to be inhabited only by rats.
Through the battered double doors and the dank brick archway, a
lively scene unfolds that is in complete contrast to the expectations
created by the building exterior.
Tables and chairs of all shapes and sizes are jammed higgledy-piggledy into the interior courtyard and rooms that branch off it.
Plants hang down from the overhead walkway creating a slightly
tropical effect when the heat of the Budapest summer is beating down
and at the back of the bar is the garden, which is basically just a
courtyard topped off with a huge industrial chimney that juts into the
night sky.
Go in any night of the week and the bar is busy with a largely young
crowd jammed into the outdoor area, their noisy chatter - in many
different languages - bouncing off the enclosed walls.
One of Szimpla's most endearing features is its bouncers - a job
title that is in fact something of a misnomer. "Shusher" would be more
appropriate, as the burly men outside the bar spend most of their time
with their fingers to their lips asking drunken revellers to keep the
noise down as they leave.
The need for silence comes from worries about complaints from local
residents about the noise being made by inebriated customers.
Szimpla itself was forced to close at midnight a few years ago, but
this did not last long and the bar is once again open until the early
hours of the morning.
Combined with the attentions of developers, who are keen to turn the
ramshackle quarter in the centre of town into an upmarket residential
area, the complaints caused many of Szimpla's peers, such as the
short-lived Mumus, to close down.