I think it is safe to say that eating is a complex experience. It’s about the flavors, the sight of the food, the order of the courses, but also in what environment we eat the contents of our plates. A good recipe is not always complicated, on the contrary, if you are willing to experiment and keep improving your knowledge, it is almost a guarantee for success. Mór24 in Balatonfüred is a place where we can be part of this.
The Lake Balaton region has become a veritable gastronomic hotspot in recent years. And what’s more, is that it’s not only the surrounding cities, such as Veszprém, where the restaurant scene has taken off, but also in the smaller coastal towns and villages, where more and more exciting stories are popping up. Even if slowly, public taste is evolving and, alongside the retro style Hungarian restaurants and the lángos-scented beach shacks, more and more decent bistros are springing up, filled with local wines and local faces. We have also discovered that it may not be necessary for a menu to be encyclopaedic in length—a few courses are enough, if complex enough for everyone to find their number.
This is where the world of small plates, sharing lunches and dinners comes in. There is no equivalent in Hungarian, but they are similar to Spanish tapas or Middle Eastern mezzes: lots of small dishes in the middle of the table, from which the party can nibble together. In 2020, Edit Almás and Tamás Albrecht dreamed up something like this, but without any restrictions. They lived in England for several years, where Tamás worked as a chef and Edit as a restaurant manager and then as a pastry chef in top restaurants such as The Ivy. They even bought a Georgian house, but when their daughter was born, the idea of moving closer to the family was discussed while the plans for setting up their own business began to take shape. They were determined to advertise their home and come if it would sell—and in less than two weeks they had a buyer. They returned to Balatonfüred in Hungary—Budapest was not even seriously considered at first, as they both grew up near the Hungarian Sea.
Their initial idea was not a restaurant, until they came across an empty storefront in Jókai Mór Street. This is where MÓR24 opened—they didn’t choose a cuisine or a style, but they didn’t opt for the now almost trite fusion gastronomy either. They simply wanted to show the diversity of ingredients, how much can be created from a head of cauliflower, and that a pot is a melting pot in both the figurative and practical sense of the word, where anything can happen. They brought the genre of the small plate with them from the UK (at that time it was almost a novelty in Hungary), which gave them the opportunity to present this diversity in an exciting way. Both Edit and Tamás have extensively traversed the Asian continent, and British gastronomy, imbued with its colonial history, presents a vibrant tapestry of flavors, so it was no question that they would build on these memories.
The same consciousness is evident in the use of ingredients: here, zero waste, or at least low waste, is not a glamorous but empty slogan, but a serious endeavour, where what is not used goes into the jar to ferment. The fruit of the wild garlic is turned into pickled pseudo-capers, the excess leaven from bread-making is used in a lángos-like flatbread (lángos is a Hungarian deep-fried flatbread), and even the cauliflower leaves are transformed into a sour salad, not to mention the homemade kombucha and buttermilk—or the kimchi, which once turned out to be too salty, but instead of being thrown away, was dried and is now used as a spice in other dishes.
That’s what makes the food at Mór24 so special. The menu is constantly changing, adhering to seasonality and the vegetables provided by Farm2Fork. You will find beautifully prepared meats on the menu (like sirloin steak, the divisive calf’s liver, a personal favorite, or the chicken terrine), however, vegetables and their thousand faces are given much more prominence. It’s not “being all fine diningy” here, but focusing on pleasure cooking, rooted in the earth: the most delicious dishes for me were just these, the refreshing green bean salad with tomato cream, the yellow beets with goat’s cheese curd and dill oil, crispy on the outside, tender on the inside, or the grilled buttery soft butternut squash with sunflower tahini and pickled elderberries, which was devourd up to the last crumbs. There’s a play of textures in everything, a little creamy, a little crunchy, a change of character from the Maillard reaction, and also a natural sweetness.
But all this would amount to nothing without the community. The small-plate concept allows two, four, however many of us to sit at the same table and share the flavours. So what’s a delicacy for one person might be quite unusual for another, but it starts a dialog and gives us an experience, which is why it’s just good to be here. Meanwhile, Edit and her team of 9 are constantly listening to guests’ needs, asking what they like and don’t like—frankly, our dishes had a slight excess of different oils, for example, but they responded immediately to our comments, re-baking the gluten-free bread and doing their best to make sure we had a good time.
They are also simply cool in the good sense of the word, as evidenced by their collaboration with the Novesta shoe brand. Though the locals have yet to fully embrace them, they are confident that sooner or later, they will be able to win over this audience as well, while also successfully navigating the challenges of inflation and other difficult circumstances. But they will continue on their way because, if you ask me, small plates, big flavors, and a warm welcome are all that is needed.