Costes Downtown

Costes Downtown is a fine-dining restaurant on the ground floor of the Prestige Hotel, on Vigyázó Ferenc utca in central Budapest. It is the more relaxed sister of Costes on Ráday utca.

Károly Gerendai, the businessman behind the Costes group, opened it in June 2015 after the hotel invited him to bring the brand to its building. The plan was a less formal kind of fine dining than at the original Costes, and within a year Michelin gave the new restaurant a star, the fifth for Budapest. The Portuguese chef Miguel Rocha Vieira, who had led the original Costes, and Tiago Sabarigo, who arrived from Texture in London, shaped the early kitchen. Kornél Kaszás and István Szántó also cooked here early in their careers.

Barnabás Hack leads the kitchen. For the tenth anniversary he built a concept called Urban Jungle around the graffiti-like city paintings of the Hungarian artist Zsombor Barakonyi, which hang on the walls and also reappear as dishes on the plate. Plants have long filled the room. Lunch and dinner bring a short à la carte menu of two or three courses, alongside a tasting menu that changes with the seasons and joins Japanese and Hungarian cooking.

A chef's table stands directly in front of the open kitchen. The chef comes out before every course to present it, and people booked there also taste wine in the cellar and return to the table through the kitchen. The wine list favors small craft producers over large labels, with a wide choice of organic and biodynamic bottles. One early snack, a paper-thin crisp made from egg white, is fried in oil for only a few seconds.