Rita’s Hungarian Delicacy: Amazing chimney cake, lángos and goulash at the Channel Islands

Have you ever heard of the Channel Islands? It’s an archipelago in the La Manche channel, and one of its bailiwicks is Guernsey. A few years ago a Hungarian gastronomy lover, Rita chose Guernsey as her new home, where she opened up her delicacy selling homemade Hungarian lángos, chimney cake and goulash. The locals seem to love them, which is not a surprise as we got the feel that Rita does everything with passion.

Originally Rita and her partner tried their luck in Great Britain, but it wasn’t what they expected, so they moved back to Hungary after two years.

But they still wanted to have adventures, so they sent their CV-s to an agency in Szeged, who found her a chef de party job in a restaurant, in Guernsey. That was the first time they’ve heard about Channel Islands and they had a go at it.

This story will be 11 years old in June. They only planned on staying for around three years but they were stuck there. Things went well and they fell in love with the magical island. It’s under British authority but is not part of the EU and has its own currency: the Guernsey pound. The population counts around 60 thousand people. In the past it used to be under French rule, that is why you can feel the French style here and the names of the streets and laws are in French.

“It might be the calmness that really caught me. This is a completely different world! Honesty box still works here and people don’t really close their doors or their cars, which they even leave going when they pop into a shop.”

Rita worked in the restaurant where she was offered the job for nine months and then worked in quality control for seven years. But she missed catering, so she decided to bake chimney cakes and show locals how great this Hungarian specialty is. Not to mention that the way it’s made is spectacular and it smells fantastic. Most people didn’t know about Hungary, but they thought that it would attract locals’ attention.

So they brought a chimney cake baker from home, set up a tent in the market and started selling chimney cakes every Friday. Rita used her mother’s recipe and people seemed to really like it. She was quite surprised when she saw herself on the front page of the local newspaper the next morning. They started going to the market but Rita still had her other job and it was hard to manage so she looked up what her options would be if she wanted to do this full time.