The story behind the world's most beautiful café

From literary legends to Instagram queues, the iconic New York Café in Budapest has survived the test of time

- Teja Lele

I am in awe as I walk into the New York Café in Budapest. The shimmering gold leaf on the arches, frescoes dancing across the ceiling and sparkling chandeliers above make it seem like I have stumbled into a ballroom rather than a café. I realise the glamour is what lures people in.

The New York Café welcomes nearly 2,500 visitors a day, most of them tourists. The queues start forming well before opening time and remain all day. It may be an Instagrammable hotspot now, but Budapest’s most glamorous coffeehouse was once the city’s intellectual heartbeat.

The story began in 1894, when the New York Life Insurance Company opened its European headquarters in Budapest. Keen to make a statement, the company hired architect Alajos Hauszmann, with Floris Korb and Kálmán Giergl, to design a palace in the Italian Renaissance style. The coffee house on the ground floor was built to serve as both a social salon and cultural statement.

Coffee first arrived in Hungary with the Turks in the 16th century, but Budapest's café culture blossomed during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, after 1867. Over the next few decades, the city was home to over 500 coffee houses. But the New York Café stood out even then.

Gabor Földes, PR and marketing manager of the Anantara New York Palace Hotel, which now houses the café, calls it more than a coffeehouse. “It’s the starting point of Hungarian modern literature.”