Gay Hussar

Welcome to The Gay Hussar Restaurant - Official Site. Our Soho Hungarian restaurant has been serving national specialties & fine wines for over 50 years.

Gay Hussar - Traditional Hungarian restaurant Soho, London

http://gayhussar.co.uk

The Gay Hussar, 2 Greek Street, London W1 | The Independent

Ever since it opened in 1953, the fate of The Gay Hussar has been intimately bound up with that of Britain's intellectual class, peaking in 1980 with the election of the late Michael Foot as Labour leader.

During the war, he served with British intelligence in Hungary, then opened a second Budapest on Frith Street before finally unveiling The Gay Hussar.

However, it was the restaurant's discovery by the firebrand Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan that led to it becoming the unofficial headquarters of Labour's intellectual left.

I start with the restaurant's famous chilled wild-cherry soup, while Caroline opts for the fried mushrooms with tartare sauce and Charlie has the fresh asparagus and bacon salad.

Scores: 1-9 stay home and cook, 10-11 needs help, 12 ok, 13 pleasant enough, 14 good, 15 very good, 16 capable of greatness, 17 special, can't wait to go back, 18 highly honourable, 19 unique and memorable, 20 as good as it gets The Gay Hussar 2 Greek Street, London W1, tel: 020 7437 0973 Lunch and dinner, Monday to Saturday.

The Gay Hussar in Soho, London, 50% Off Food | tastecard

It's a nice and cosy place and we liked the decor.

Food however was a bit disappointing... We ordered soup of the day which was a Hungarian bean soup and beef goulash soup however the only difference between the 2 was 2 slices of sausage in mine and 2 pieces of beef in my friend’s one.

However the biggest disappointment was the main course we picked veal goulash with galuska and what we got was a few pieces of veal with.... Yes the soup liquid that we had for starter as a sauce!

At least galuska was nice... You can't compare it to a proper goulash that we had while on a trip to Budapest, the dessert didn't live up to expectation either.

Overall pretty disappointed but on the plus side we enjoyed a nice bottle of Hungarian wine. "

The Gay Hussar - Wikipedia

The Gay Hussar is a celebrated Hungarian restaurant located at 2 Greek Street, Soho, central London, England.

Victor Sassie[1] was the founder of The Gay Hussar restaurant in 1953.

Sassie was sent to Budapest in Hungary by the British Hotel and Restaurant Association when he was seventeen.

On his return to London in 1940, he established first the Budapest restaurant and then The Gay Hussar, which was to become popular with left wing politicians.

[3] The restaurant was named in honour of the elite Hussars of the Hungarian army.

The Gay Hussar, 2 Greek Street, London W1 | The Independent

Ever since it opened in 1953, the fate of The Gay Hussar has been intimately bound up with that of Britain's intellectual class, peaking in 1980 with the election of the late Michael Foot as Labour leader.

During the war, he served with British intelligence in Hungary, then opened a second Budapest on Frith Street before finally unveiling The Gay Hussar.

However, it was the restaurant's discovery by the firebrand Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan that led to it becoming the unofficial headquarters of Labour's intellectual left.

I start with the restaurant's famous chilled wild-cherry soup, while Caroline opts for the fried mushrooms with tartare sauce and Charlie has the fresh asparagus and bacon salad.

Scores: 1-9 stay home and cook, 10-11 needs help, 12 ok, 13 pleasant enough, 14 good, 15 very good, 16 capable of greatness, 17 special, can't wait to go back, 18 highly honourable, 19 unique and memorable, 20 as good as it gets The Gay Hussar 2 Greek Street, London W1, tel: 020 7437 0973 Lunch and dinner, Monday to Saturday.

Grace Dent reviews Gay Hussar | London Evening Standard

ES Food Newsletter For reasons involving sentimentality and schadenfreude, the editor dispatched me this week to Hungarian stalwart the Gay Hussar on Greek Street, to document its final days.

And obviously, at one point, the Gay Hussar was de rigueur, but now it is the opposite and, sadly, a restaurant can’t pay its bills with the love of folk who think it’s really charming that it hasn’t been turned into a Starbucks yet, but never want to eat cumbersome plates of veal goulash beside a dusty library of political biographies.

The Gay Hussar could be a gorgeous, battily mad, imperfect yet raffish feeding and watering hole, steeped in history and juicy anecdotes, evoking the sense whenever one pops in — for a bowl of fish dumplings in dill sauce and a large apricot brandy — that London survives and we’re just ridiculous cameo characters passing through.

But presently, let’s not kid anyone, the Gay Hussar needs investment, a big yellow skip placed outside and a high-octane declutter and its entire menu scrapped, refocused and made appetising.

At the Gay Hussar £18 will buy you a plate of smoked goose with red cabbage and solet (Hungarian bean stew).

Can the conservatives save the Gay Hussar, Labour's canteen ...

A month after their election victory three years ago, Patrick McLoughlin, then the party’s chief whip, assembled the entire whips’ office and headed to the Gay Hussar.

Since it opened in 1953, this cosy Hungarian restaurant on Greek Street in Soho has been known as Labour’s canteen.

Regular diners are concerned a new owner may not respect the restaurant’s heritage.

“It is a good deal less Hungarian than any restaurant I have been to in Hungary,” says Brian Sewell, the art critic and a regular diner for the past 40 years.

“There was a crisis when he became leader because people thought the Gay Hussar was a bit Old Labour,” says Dan Hodges, The Daily Telegraph columnist.

The Gay Hussar's sale should teach us to use or lose our favourite ...

My tiny (and yes, somewhat obsessive) corner of the internet was howling in anguish on Friday as news filtered in about the imminent sale of The Gay Hussar restaurant.

Declaring itself England's only Hungarian restaurant, it's not only a poignant ghost of old Soho, but a shrine to political history, the scene of endless plotting and backstabbing, pacts and backscratching.

Victor's remarkable insider knowledge wasn't just gleaned directly from the politicians and socialites on whom he swooped like an avuncular vulture: renowned chef Shaun Hill, of The Walnut Tree, worked there in the early 70s "cooking gulyas, and helping Victor cook the books".

An approach cheerfully adopted by the likes of notorious MP Tom Driberg, whose Gay Hussar antics included trying to recruit Mick Jagger into standing for the Labour party in an upstairs salon.

But restaurants echoing with the voices of the past are disappearing, while the new foodiegentsia follows the herd in search of the latest fist food.

Gay Hussar | Restaurants in Soho, London

Inside, all is as it should be at the Gay Hussar: dark wooden panelling bedecked with political portraits or Martin Rowson caricatures; nicotine-brown ceiling; polite, prompt Hungarian staff; and shelves of political biographies.

On a sweltering July afternoon we should have ordered the chilled wild cherry soup, or even the fish terrine with beetroot sauce and cucumber.

Nevertheless, bean soup, a hearty, salty, wintery ‘soup of the day’, was lifted by slices of intensely smoky sausage.

Intense flavours also characterised a main course of paprika-rich venison goulash, served with splayed out gherkin, tangy red cabbage and couscous-like tarhonya.

The fruity, jelly-like mixed berry pudding provides needed refreshment; were he still active during the Gay Hussar’s 60-year lifetime, it might even have cheered up Gladstone.