At Gundel, tasting the menu Pope John Paul II enjoyed during his ’96 visit to Hungary – photos

Following the grand November announcement of the Gundel Ball’s return in 2026, Daily News Hungary was invited back to the Gundel Restaurant on 7 January for a crisp press lunch. The date coincided with one of the snowiest days Budapest had seen in years, leaving much of the city in near chaos—but when Gundel calls, the invitation simply cannot be declined. This time, the storied restaurant used four courses to introduce two separate announcements at once: the headline guests of the upcoming Gundel Ball, and a new addition to the iconic venue’s “Famous Menus” series, inspired by Pope John Paul II’s 1996 visit to Hungary.

Setting the scene

Gundel has always understood the value of place. Standing at the edge of City Park, the restaurant grew alongside Budapest’s late-19th-century appetite for leisure and display. Although the Gundel name dates from 1910, the site’s role as a social venue is older still, shaped by the park, the zoo and the idea that dining could be part of a broader urban performance. 

In its interwar prime, Gundel functioned less like a single restaurant than a cultural hub, with garden seating, live music and a clientele that mixed visitors, locals and public figures.

In more recent decades, Gundel has continued to serve as an informal stage for state and ceremonial hospitality, hosting Pope Francis during his Hungarian visits in 2021 and 2023, and previously welcoming Queen Elizabeth II during her 1993 visit to Hungary. Such moments reinforce the restaurant’s role not only as a witness to history, but as an active participant in it.

The Gundel Ball in brief

The revived Gundel Ball is presented as a break from exclusivity rather than a return to it. Around 300–350 guests are expected, with room to stretch to 400 if demand allows. The opening dance will be performed by young first-time debutants drawn from universities, open applications and amateur dance circles, including a wheelchair-using young couple whose participation underlines the event’s emphasis on inclusion. The debutants were trained and prepared for the ball under the guidance of dance choreographer Andrea Keleti.

Three partner organisations — MEOSZ (National Federation of Associations of People with Physical Disabilities), SINOSZ (National Association of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing and its Budapest Branch) and the Lámpás ’92 Foundation — will be present on the night, reinforcing the idea that social responsibility is not an add-on but part of the event’s structure.

Learn more about the upcoming Gundel Ball in our previous article: Among the Stars: Gundel Ball Shines Again in 2026– video.

A menu as historical reference

The press lunch’s main purpose, however, was to introduce the next “Famous Menu”: a contemporary interpretation of the meal prepared by Gundel’s team for Pope John Paul II during his 1996 visit to Pannonhalma on the occasion of the thousand-year jubilee of the archabbey. 

At the time, the brief was strict. The Pope was fasting, meat was off the table, the food had to be light and recognisable, and it had to respect monastic sensibilities as much as papal protocol. The modern version, created by corporate chef András Wolf and executive chef Róbert Vérten, does not attempt to recreate that menu dish by dish. Instead, it translates the constraints into a controlled yet filling four-course sequence.

Papal preferences

The menu begins with butter-sautéed wild mushrooms accompanied by brioche and calf jus—a clever choice by Gundel, as it is known to few that jus, despite its richness, does not in itself break the fast. There is a quiet historical nod here as well — Pope John Paul II himself was known to be particularly fond of mushrooms in his youth.

A cumin-scented vegetable soup with a poached quail egg follows, the spice used as a background note rather than a statement. The main course—grilled zander served “Gundel style”—however, required a slight adjustment at Pannonhalma Archabbey, where there was one clear preference: they simply did not like spinach. As a result, the Benedictine version of the dish is served with pea purée and grilled vegetables instead.

Contemporary reports underline the scale of the occasion as well as its restraint. For the main course alone, Gundel reportedly purchased around 150 kilograms of zander, selecting only the best portions to serve roughly 140 guests. 

The closing dessert, Pannonhalmok, combines vanilla, chocolate, and walnut in a precise, recognisable form—closer to a polished riff on the Hungarian Somló-style tradition: layered, textural, and intended to leave a dash of sweetness rather than a sugar shock.

Hungary’s first seeds in space

Threaded through the lunch was the ball’s cosmic motif. Gundel’s partner winery, Etyeki Kúria, presented a Chardonnay whose story quite literally reaches into space. In a first for Hungary, grape seeds of the same Chardonnay variety cultivated at the estate were sent into orbit as part of a mission with the Orion Space Generation Foundation—making them the first Hungarian grape seeds ever to leave Earth. Only one Chinese winery had taken part in a similar experiment before.

The seeds travelled at a Guinness-worthy speed of around 29,000 km/h, reaching an altitude of approximately 620 kilometres aboard a SpaceX Falcon rocket. They flew alongside more than 120 other Hungarian plant seeds, sent for various biological experiments, symbolically placing Hungarian agricultural culture within a space research programme.

The Chardonnay served at the ball comes from the 2024 harvest, though it was not produced from the space-travelled seeds. First tasted by us, lucky journalists, it will be poured to selected guests at the ball. 

Hungarian astronauts at Gundel

The choice of headline guests reinforces the ball’s “Among the Stars” theme without drifting into abstraction. Tibor Kapu, Gyula Cserényi and Bertalan Farkas represent three distinct phases of Hungarian space research, brought together in a deliberately symbolic configuration that links past achievement, present expertise and future possibility. Tibor Kapu, the second Hungarian astronaut and the first to work aboard the International Space Station, embodies the programme’s current momentum; Gyula Cserényi, his fully trained reserve, points toward its near future; while Bertalan Farkas anchors the evening in historical fact, his 1980 mission remaining a reference point for generations.

What the lunch clarified

The press lunch did not repeat the promises already made in earlier coverage. Instead, it narrowed the focus. The Gundel Ball will trade in performance, music and scale. The dignity menu does something else: it turns a specific historical moment into a reservable experience.

Available from 17 February in two and four-course formats by registration, the menu is not part of the ball itself. It stands on its own, as a reminder that Gundel’s strongest claims are rarely made on stage. They arrive on plates, quietly arguing that history, here, is still an operational ingredient.