You're listening to an English edition of the Herczeg Podcast, from Budapest FM. In this episode the host, Zoltán Herczeg, sits down with Roy Zsidai, one of Hungary's best-known names in hospitality, the man behind restaurants like Spíler and Baltazár and a family business stretching from Budapest to Marbella. The two met at university years ago but were never close, and in today's Hungary they're filed on opposite political sides. Herczeg is a self-described liberal; Zsidai gets sorted with the governing camp. The whole conversation quietly dismantles that divide. One narrator will carry both voices, and tell you who is speaking.
Herczeg opens by admitting that calling them friends would be a stretch; in their whole lives they've probably spoken less than they will in this one hour. But they share a mutual respect. What impressed him, he says, was that whenever Zsidai called him, over some shared matter, he spoke to him plainly, as a partner, a fellow human being, never as someone on the other team. And that, Herczeg says, is exactly what Hungary needs most right now: normal, humane conversation across the lines. He wants to strip the labels off his guest and ask who Roy Zsidai actually is, and how anyone becomes a figure in fine dining in the first place.
Zsidai pushes back gently on the word restaurateur. He calls himself a gastronomer and a builder, and, like Herczeg, an economist by training. Then he tells the origin story. His parents worked at the Intercontinental hotel, where they met; both trained in hospitality. In the mid-1970s an American named Roy Watson, head of the American Hotel Association, discovered them on a European tour and invited them to his hotel chain in the States, struck by their professionalism. His parents spent a year and a half training there, and that is where Roy himself was born, and named, after his godfather. Watson, he says, became the most defining person in his life after his parents; he spent the summers of his teenage years with him, absorbing a whole way of thinking at the most open and formative age.
What way of thinking? One rule became law in the family firm: you are never allowed to begin a sentence with the words, the problem is. If a tram runs over your mother, Watson would say, that's a problem. Everything else is a task, a challenge. Hungarians especially, Zsidai observes, but really people everywhere, love the bus-stop conversation: the problem is the young people, the problem is politics, the problem is the weather, and time passes and nobody moves an inch. His approach is the opposite: name the problem once, then spend the same breath on solutions, and keep moving toward one. He calls it the real English-style liberalism his godfather taught him, and defines it in three words: tough, open, and honest. And, he says, it works.
That American mentality collided with communist Hungary. His parents founded their business, Piero, in 1982, just as the law began to allow private enterprise. When they came home after their year and a half in the States, a hotel director with ties to the interior ministry told his mother: comrade, forget everything you learned over there. That slap, Zsidai says, only lit the fuse. All the skill and drive and action-orientation they'd built up abroad turned into pure defiance, and out of it grew a private business at a time when there was almost none. It's the same theme, he says, that runs through Pintér Béla's play The Triumph of Mediocrity, and a line from Márai: now come the ugly ones, and they drag everything down into the mud. Mediocrity, he argues, always tries to justify its own failure by insisting that real achievement is just luck, or some kind of cheat.
Herczeg asks how much you need connections, connection-capital, to get anywhere in Hungary today. Zsidai's answer surprises him. Hungary, he says, is actually far more open than its neighbors. He works internationally, partnered with Kempinski in Spain, working with Jamie Oliver, and everywhere around us, in Spain, in Austria, there is a strong, healthy patriotism that makes it genuinely hard for an outsider to open a business. In Hungary, by contrast, founding a company, opening a bank account, launching a venture has only gotten simpler year after year, sometimes simpler than in England. The whole rise of Budapest's party district, he says, proves you don't need connections: places opened out of half-ruined buildings on a zero-forint budget.
That party district is where his own story turns. Around 2012, after years of legal wrangling over a space in the Gozsdu courtyard, he and his partners opened Spíler. He'd fallen in love with the pulse of the district, the honest camaraderie among wildly colorful people, a historic moment. His bet was that a slice of that crowd, maybe five or ten percent, no longer wanted the cheapest beer and a slab of bread with onion; they wanted simple food done without compromise. So Spíler served exactly that: craft burgers, craft beer, the beginnings of Hungary's beer revolution and burger revolution and street-food scene. On opening night, coming up from fixing the beer taps, he looked out and couldn't see the sky for the crowd. And, inevitably, everyone tried to copy it, though you can't clone a place's DNA, which, like a person's, is the sum of hundreds of tiny factors.
Then the conversation turns to fragility. Fine dining depends on tourism, and Herczeg presses: when COVID cut off the foreign, paying demand overnight, what happens? Can the Hungarian customer afford a Jamie Oliver or a Spíler? Zsidai widens the lens. In any world city, the cultural and culinary offering is far larger than local demand, that's what makes it a world city; business and tourist traffic make up ninety percent of Budapest's dining. In Vienna, much of that is Austrian visitors, because the countryside there is richer. Part of it is money, the alcohol VAT here is still twenty-seven percent against Austria's twenty, but part of it is a value choice, and a cultural one. A taxi driver in Lyon goes out to a little bistro with friends two or three times a week, wine on the table, because that's part of the culture. That habit, Zsidai says, is what a century of broken history, feudalism lingering here long after England had moved past it, never let Hungary fully build.
Which brings them to the missing middle class. Herczeg asks what Hungary needs to finally become a civic, bourgeois society, so that success isn't met with envy and suspicion, so a person doesn't have to feel ashamed for wanting to earn an honest living well. Zsidai returns to mediocrity, and then redefines liberalism itself. A real citizen, he says, is by default liberal, not in today's sense of the word but in the sense of a hundred years ago, the way Kossuth was liberal: anything can be discussed. When someone asks you a question, it isn't an attack or the setup for an insult. He learned this working with Germans twenty years ago; at first he and a colleague wondered what they were getting at, then realized they simply asked because they were curious about the answer. As a consultant at Boston Consulting and Roland Berger, he was trained to question everything, not to nag, but because only by questioning the usual practice can you see something from a new angle and make a real leap. That, he says, is what liberalism means to him, and he calls himself a civic liberal who nonetheless deeply respects tradition, and sees no contradiction: respecting the other means not forcing yourself on them. We talk, we don't convert.
So why, Herczeg asks, is a man like this filed with the governing camp? Type Zsidai's name online and it says: close to the government. Zsidai shrugs at it. The press, all of it, lives off manufacturing sides. He offers an analogy: it's as if the shampoo makers split people into factions, and the Schwarzkopf users rise up against the Wella users, and articles expose the secret Wella agents among the Schwarzkopf troops. Maybe, he says, it started because Orbán's daughter once interned at his company, one of some fifty interns over the years. For Herczeg this is the heart of it: he'd almost come to believe he should be ashamed of his liberal values, until he realized the whole division is artificial, deliberately stoked, so we bruise each other instead of doing what Zsidai does, building his own business, educating himself, raising his own children.
Herczeg asks how, on earth, one man fits it all into a day: fourteen-odd restaurants and hotels, four children, and, it turns out, four more. For a few years now the family has sponsored four children from very poor backgrounds, mostly in eastern Hungary, high-achieving kids whose parents are committed to their studies, supporting them all the way to a university degree, through an existing foundation with the infrastructure to make sure the money reaches the right place. His own days start before seven with the children, coffee and conversation before school, then running or tennis, then constant meetings, all while the emails and calls never stop. He runs the restaurants, he says, through people, through leaders and a company culture, because after four decades this is a mission, not a job: the dishwasher and the prep cook included, people who are comrades in an operation to make Hungarian gastronomy bloom and Budapest an unmissable city, people who will one day stand proudly before their grandchildren and say what they built.
Herczeg keeps circling back to hardship, and Zsidai answers with perspective. A virus, he says, was the greatest tragedy of our lives, and yes, it hammered his sector, but nobody was shot, no house collapsed from a bombing. His grandparents were married in a cellar during the Second World War, while the building next door was flattened; friends who'd stepped out for a moment died when their house was bombed. His grandfather's tank exploded right in front of the Piero building when he climbed out to fetch bread from the bakery there. Those, he says, are roots. Nobody carried him into the castle district on a silver tray in 2010; his grandparents married in that cellar, his grandfather's tank blew up on that street. Whatever anyone invents about him, those facts remain, and anyone who cares can find the truth, if they read something other than the propaganda that exists in abundance on every side.
Near the end they look outward, to the eight million Hungarians who don't live in Budapest and who, both agree, could be living far better, thirty years into EU membership without the Austrian or German wages that a single generation should have brought. Herczeg asks whether the quality revolution can trickle out to the countryside, not just to the resort towns but to Miskolc, to Encs, to the small cities. Zsidai says it already is. Look at the last ten years in perspective, he says: enormous change. The starred, high-end restaurants matter the way Formula One matters to the car industry, the technology filters down into everyday cooking, and good restaurants now exist where a decade ago there were none. Austria stays the benchmark, and that's fair, but Austria is one of Europe's three richest countries. It could always be faster, he says, but it's going, quietly, the right way.
