It is 11.45 pm, and the sky has finally lost its indigo shade and committed itself to black on a summer day in Budapest. I am in a thin jacket, standing at the back of a very long queue to enter a bar, a queue which, by all rights, I shouldn’t be in at all.

Four of my friends are inside, but I, the impatient hungry one, I have decided to beat the system, go out to eat cheaply, and then return sated and ready to drink. But this is Budapest, and everyone’s basal state is a kind of determined grimness, so when I return to the bar’s entrance I am refused direct re-entry. Instead, I am shown to the back of a very long queue in an air thick with foreign accents.

This is outside the Hungarian capital’s first and most iconic ruin bar — Szimpla Kert — a pile of rubble alchemised into a spectacularly self-aware landmark. This large dilapidated building was someone’s house once, but then communism happened and poverty happened and squatting happened, and this abandoned magnificence became a millennial chic drinking attraction.

When two young men set up Szimpla in the early 2000s, they took over a dysfunctional building and made it something cool. Ruin bars became a thing; others proliferated and then it became Budapest’s schtick. Now the district is crammed with many like this one.

In Szimpla, the walls are cracked, the furniture scattered. A sprawling courtyard reveals the carcass of a vintage-style car, where people sit and drink. Several staircases — each dishevelled in its own way — lead to an upper chamber, where one room gives way to the next, each one asymmetric, spray-painted, defaced to cult perfection.

I know this because I was inside not just earlier this evening, but also a few days ago. That was my first night in this Eastern European city, and we cautiously sipped our palinkas — a transparent, fruit-based spirit local to Budapest — which stung more than I cared for.

Then too, I was eager to skip ahead and be ready for the morning. And so off I went, leaving my friends inside, to head to the supermarket next door to buy groceries for breakfast. Seeking re-entry at the door, I was stopped by bouncers, whose sourness was definitely Hungarian but whose attitude was the usual international intransigence that was bouncer-speak. “No food, no drink,” said a blue-uniformed hunk of muscle, sending me to the side. His comprador added in no uncertain terms, in both English and body language, that I would have to abandon everything vaguely consumable before re-entering.

Cereal, milk, teabags and bread in hand, I stood aside shamefaced and helpless, waiting for the rescue party. In one corner by the door, a couple of blue crates was beginning to pile up with confiscated items — water bottles mostly. None of the other offenders had evidently had the inconvenient foresight to prepare for breakfast.

With cell phone signal having given up, two friends arrived outside as part of the search party, wondering why my shopping expedition had taken so long. Instead they found me stranded and ignored on the adjacent pavement. Appeals to the better nature of the bouncers were made, but finding little traction, we were resigned. This ruin bar had a ruinous policy, we decided, and made off to find the next one in the jumble of streets in the Jewish quarter.

I was denied entry at another, and another, until too tired to care I relinquished my milk and bread at the entrance of the third place. Settled at a table watching a football game, I nevertheless returned to the entrance every 15 minutes, beer in hand, to check if the groceries were still there. That was Wednesday night.

Over the next few days, Budapest’s surliness stained every day, from the glum waitress to the suspicious ticket-checker. When Sunday morning arrived bright and forgiving, we took a walking tour around the city. At the end of that three-hour jaunt, the guide recommended an excellent farmers’ market. It had the city’s finest cheese, bread and condiments, she said.

Walking through the Jewish quarter, she stopped outside Szimpla Kert: the site of my earlier downfall, the place from which I had suffered a humiliating banishment on account of my provocative shopping items. I went inside and all around me was bread, milk and every kind of grocery offering. The stalls heaved with cheese, the tables had made way for rye and meats, and the merry eating and drinking covered all kinds of wonderful breakfast foods. Cruel Szimpla, evil Budapest.

Bhavya Doreis a Mumbai-based journalist

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