HALASZ, Zoltan; George Lang. [William Safire].
Gundel 1894-1994.
Budapest: Helikon, 1993.
$300.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-152484
+$500
First Edition of Gundel 1894-1994; Inscribed by George Lang to Pulitzer Prize Winning Columnist William Safire
First edition of this centenary history of Gundel, the legendary Budapest restaurant. Quarto, original cloth, pictorial endpapers, illustrated with color photographs. Association copy, inscribed by George Langin the year of publication on the title page, "To: Helene and Bill Safire ...it all started with the Princess from Monaco... Fondly from George Lang, Nov 29 1993." Lang inscribed this copy to the columnist William Safire and his wife, Helene. Safire, the longtime New York Times political columnist and author of its "On Language" column, won the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary in 1978 and had earlier served as a speechwriter for President Richard Nixon. He and Lang were fixtures of the same New York literary and gastronomic world. Fine in a very good dust jacket with bumping and a couple of small closed tears. Written by Zoltan Halasz and the restaurateur George Lang, who led its restoration. Jacket illustration from Milton Glaser's Gundel poster.
The Budapest restaurant Gundel traces its origins to 1894, when a restaurant was opened in the city's Varosliget park. It took its name and its fame from Karoly Gundel, who assumed its management in 1910 and made it one of the great restaurants of Europe, renowned for dishes such as the Gundel palacsinta, the walnut and chocolate crepe that bears its name. Nationalized under communism and left to decline, the restaurant was acquired in 1991 by the restaurateur George Lang and the businessman Ronald Lauder, who restored it and reopened it in time for its centenary. George Lang was a Hungarian-born violinist who survived the Second World War, lost his parents in the Holocaust, and emigrated to the United States, where he became one of the most celebrated figures in American dining as the proprietor of New York's Cafe des Artistes and the author of The Cuisine of Hungary and the memoir Nobody Knows the Truffles I've Seen. Written with the Hungarian journalist and food writer Zoltan Halasz and illustrated throughout, this volume traces the restaurant's first hundred years.
Gundel 1894-1994.
$300.00
In Stock