Hungarian Culinary Tour Profile: Taste Hungary

Taste Hungary is a small tour operator that specializes in customized food, wine, and market tours for individuals and small groups in Budapest and Hungary. “We offer our guests personalized travel experiences based on our local contacts and inside knowledge,” says owner Carolyn Banfalvi, who is also the author of Food Wine Budapest, and The Food and Wine Lover's Guide to Hungary. “Our mission is to introduce our guests to the best of Hungarian food and drink, so they will love it as much as we do,” she says.

Plan Your Trip:

Tour length: From a half-day to multiple day tours.
Group size: Group size typically limited to six, although individual tours and tours for larger groups can be arranged.
Price: Prices vary depending on tour content. For market tours, the prices generally range from 50 to 100 euro per person (group discounts may be available). For wine tours, two day tours start at 200-300 euro per person. Prices includes guide and transportation, excludes accommodation, tastings and meals. A complete price estimate is provided upon booking.
Transport: Market tours are on foot and public transportation. The trips outside Budapest are by car.
Booking: Book with as much advance notice as possible. Generally, market tours can be arranged with less notice, multiple-day require more than a few weeks notice.
Phone: (+36) 20 531 7315
Email: carolyn@carolynbanfalvi.com
Website: Taste Hungary

Interview with Carolyn Banfalvi, owner of Taste Hungary

Q. How is your service different from other tour operators in your area?

A. There are many tour operators which offer general tours, and sometimes throw in a gastronomy or wine tour. But these tours aren’t given by dedicated food people and don’t delve very deeply below the surface. They tend to focus on the more general tourist aspects of food and drink, which won’t be sufficient for those who are really focused on food (like our guests). There are also a few large international operators offering the occasional week-long trip to Hungary. These tours may be well-done, but they are very different than ours since we live here and stay on top of the food and wine world!

We do lots of research, and we love to take guests to places which they might not be able to find on their own, be it a meal in a Hungarian home, or a small family-run winery or pálinka distillery. We have never led the same tour twice, and we love that Hungary offers endless opportunities for culinary exploration and tasty discovery.

Q. Who guides your tours? How are they selected and what are their qualifications?

A. We are a very small company, just my husband and I, and we really like it this way because we do all of the tours ourselves, and all of the planning for the tours! We think this personal attention that we give to our guests is one of our main assets.

I've been living in Budapest since 1999, with the exception of two years that I spent back in the States attending culinary school. My book Food Wine Budapest (Little Bookroom, June 2008), was recently nominated for an International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) book award. And The Food and Wine Lover's Guide to Hungary (Park Kiado, October 2008), was a winner of a Gourmand World Cookbook Award. My articles have appeared in dozens of publications including Saveur, Gastronomica, Gourmet.com, Olive (BBC), Chow.com, The Globe and Mail, The Wall Street Journal, Chow.com, The Washington Times, Delta Inflight, and others, and I am an editor at Chew.hu, a Hungarian food blog.

Q. What's your most popular offering?

A. Most visitors to Hungary spend all of their time in Budapest, so a market tour is something that is pretty easy to squeeze into their trip. Visiting the markets really does give a fantastic overview of what Hungarian food is all about. Fewer people plan long enough trips to allow for time to visit the rest of Hungary, but they really should. Seeing the countryside, particularly the wine regions, gives a way more complete view of the country and both its culinary traditions and trends. We do fewer wine tours, but we love doing them. A Seattle sommelier who I recently interviewed is convinced that Hungarian wine will be “the next big thing.” We’ve long-been convinced of that, and after tasting all of the various types of Hungarian wine that aren’t really available outside of the country, our guests tend to agree.

Q. Please share three or four unique experiences that a traveler will have on your tours that they couldn't experience on their own.

A. A meal at my Hungarian mother-in-law’s house (who is possibly the best home cook in Hungary); a wine tasting trip that includes visits to several wineries a day, meals at carefully selected restaurants (or at the wineries themselves), and accommodation at small pensions run by winemakers; visiting several markets in one day (some which rarely see tourists) to see the extraordinary variety of fresh produce and meat available in Hungary.

Q. Any optional add-ons to your tours?

A. We also have an apartment that we rent in Budapest, which we can offer to guests who want to truly feel like locals.

Q. What’s a question you're asked most often? (And what’s the answer?)

A. People are always very interested in finding out how Hungarian prepare all of the different fruits, vegetables, and cuts of meat that we see in the market, so lead them through all of the possibilities. Regarding Hungarian wine, people are always surprised by how good it has become, and they always want to know why it is so unavailable outside of the country. This is really due to a lack of marketing and lack of attention by the industry to creating export markets. And, people are always interested in hearing about my personal thoughts and experiences on being an American food writer living in Budapest.