“Do you want with bacon or without bacon?” asks the waitress at Paprikash. She’s talking about the turos csusza, homemade egg noodles covered with farmer cheese and sour cream. That’s a side dish. Before that comes Jokay’s bean soup, based on a recipe from the 19th-century Hungarian novelist and journalist Mor Jokai. A spoonful of sour cream melts into the red broth, thick with sausage and vegetables. And on the table, instead of salt, is a shaker of paprika.
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Owner Tamas Bosze came to the U.S. 30 years ago and opened Paprikash in 1995. He says it offers Chicago’s only authentic Hungarian food. He ought to know–he grew up working in his uncle’s restaurant in Budapest–and the Hungarian-speaking tables smoking, laughing, and eating goulash bear him out. Not that a little schlock doesn’t show up. Ropes of garlic are hung from the ceiling, and sticky European pop plays overhead. But there’s nothing frivolous about the food.
Olah–a handsome, white-haired landmass of a man–first learned to cook in his grandmother’s kitchen, then at culinary school in Budapest. He worked at a handful of American and Italian restaurants in Chicago before Paprikash gave him the chance to make the cuisine he grew up on. He cooks with a level of concentration normally seen in Trappist monks and air traffic controllers. Chopping a red pepper, he looks like he’s memorizing it. His farmer’s plate is a still life of Hungarian salami, ham, korozott (cheese spread), peppers, onions, and radishes; you can taste the salt, the sharpness, just looking at it.
Olah puts a hand on either side of his round, hard belly and surveys the kitchen for a moment. The waitresses, small and fast as birds, line up to chirp “Beloushka!” and read him their orders. “Beloush, I have two tables, and on this two tables I have two appetizer,” one says breathlessly. He smiles gently and picks up his knife. Winter isn’t going anywhere.
