Cafes are no longer just a place for relaxation or for meeting friends and companions and chatting about the facts and details of daily life, and they are no longer a stop for strangers in cities, or for reading newspapers and having breakfast or a piece of candy with a cup of coffee or a tea drink only, but they embrace history and culture, and literary, artistic and social movements.

Cafes are titles for life, especially city life, and a vital image of historical, intellectual and cognitive transformations with the presence of literary, artistic and cultural icons in them and their habit of forming a cultural movement or a literary current or holding a weekly or monthly meeting, and this is the case of most of the famous cafes frequented by intellectuals.

However, there is another aspect that makes a cafe a unique state among the world's cafes, which is the distinction of this cafe or that by its structure, style, size and aesthetic shape.

In the Italian style:

A cafe like the "New York Cafe" in the Hungarian capital Budapest is considered by observers one of the most luxurious cafes in the world. This cafe designed in the Italian Renaissance style makes you doubt your information and images when you enter and visit it, as you will find chandeliers hanging from high ceilings decorated with wonderful murals, which makes it look more like luxurious palaces than just a place you to have a piece of candy with a cup of coffee. It is full of columns with historical carved styles carefully, rich in various colored forms and shapes.

"New York Cafe" is one of the oldest cafes in Budapest, with a history dating back 127 years. The queue of customers wishing to enter it extends along Elizabeth Boulevard, which is one of the main streets in Budapest, where the cafe can receive about 2000 customers on its busiest days, and even on the least busy days it receives about 1300 people.

The most beautiful cafe

The story of "New York Cafe" begins in 1894, when the "New York Life Insurance Company" opened its European headquarters in Budapest, and decided then to build a cafe inside the company. Although the Turks were the ones who introduced coffee to Hungary for the first time in the sixteenth century, the culture of building elegant cafes that was flourishing in Vienna did not begin in Hungary until after the building of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1867; when nearly 500 cafes were opened in the city during that time. "New York Cafe" was one of these cafes, as its owners aimed to create "the most beautiful cafe in the world", and they did their best to achieve that.

In a cafe frequented by intellectuals and artists from various segments, the literary movement known as "Nyugat" was born in it, which took this name from a periodical magazine in which the poetry and prose of Hungarian writers was published.

Thus it can be said that "New York Cafe" was not just a cafe, but rather as a starting point for modern Hungarian literature, as all the most famous writers and poets used to come here, and the place was always crowded with writers.

In fact, the most influential newspapers in Hungary were edited on the second floor of this building.

Over the years, the cafe went through many changes, as it became at one time a restaurant, while it became at another time a shop selling sports equipment.

But in 2001, the "Boscolo Group" obtained the building and started a project to restore it that lasted for 5 years, as the historical cafe was reopened in 2006 with its decoration with artistic and mural paintings, including the well-known Statue of Liberty.

Gabor Foldes, Director of Public Relations and Marketing at the New York Palace Hotel, of which the cafe is part, says: Most people come only to take pictures. Regarding the menu, the restaurant includes traditional Hungarian sweets, but visitors do not come just to eat but to enjoy the design, general appearance and the cafe.

The cafe carries many stories, as it is full of pictures of famous writers who started their careers there.

When the cafe becomes with all this fame and widespread, it becomes a place for recording historical events and positions and also artistic, literary, media and cultural works that are linked to one of the most prominent places full of history and the distinct tourist, literary and social record.

References:

https://aawsat.com/home/article/2040781

https://arabic.cnn.com/travel/article/2019/12/12/budapest-new-york-cafe