How to order soup in Hungarian

For our Graybo and our Kate, both of whom will be heading to Hungary at some point this year. Ordering soup is an important skill, as Hungarian soup is cheap and comes in copious quantities, and is delicious to the point of being better than any soup you ever tasted. If you’re lucky. Soup is leves [levesh], and plural is levesek which is the heading it will probably be under on the menu. Here are the main types of soup:

Gulyasleves [gooyash-levesh] = goulash soup. You really can’t go to Hungary and not try this; it’s nothing like the meat stew that is described as goulash in english-speaking countries: not a stew at all, but a rich soup, with much emphasis on the paprika. One variety is bogracsgulyas [bogratch-gooyash], which means it comes in a small cauldron, although the literal translation of bogracs is kettle.

Bableves [boblevesh] = bean soup. May be listed as Jokai Bableves. Smoky, creamy soup which often has large lumps of pork fat in it. Still nice, though.

Raguleves/csirkeraguleves [cheerka-ragu-levesh] = chicken soup, slightly thicker than a broth, usually has a lemony flavour, and yet more sour cream. Did I mention the sour cream? There will be some of this in anything you order. This soup may be described as tarkonyos, which means tarragony. One of my favourite things. This could also be pulykaraguleves, [poika-ragu-levesh] which would be turkey.

Hagymaleves [hojma-levesh] = onion soup. May be served cipoban, which means in a bread roll, which is a novel experience. Definitely point to this one on the menu, as a slight mispronounciation will cause you to order onion soup in a shoe.

Fokhagymakremleves [fok-hojma-krem-leves] = garlic soup. This stuff is amazing. It was the only good thing to happen to me in a town called Gyor.

Gyumolcsleves [joomolch-levesh] = fruit soup. This is served chilled, and has actual cream rather than sour cream in it. The usual variety is a sour cherry soup. Yes it’s a dessert, but it will be listed with the soups and served as a starter.

And now some manners:

In Hungarian, there isn’t really a sentence structure equivalent to I would like the goulash soup, please; you just have to make a polite face while telling the waiter what you want, which will probably be lost on them anyway, and certainly won’t be returned.

Here’s what you say: A gulyaslevest kerek [o gooyash-levest kayrek, where the o is as in hot]. This means I want the goulash soup. You put the t on the end of the word gulyasleves to mark it as the object of the sentence, but really, don’t worry about this, just do it.

When the surly waiter brings you your soup, you can say koszonom [kersernerm], which means thank you. All of these hungarian words are supposed to have accents on them, but I fear that WordPress will just explode, so go with my phonetic renderings instead.

There are occasional readers of Rise whose hungarian language and soup skills are far superior to mine, so do check the comments box for addenda and correctia.