The Hungarians could teach us a thing or two about comfort food. Take turoscusza tepertovel, even if you can't pronounce it: a towering platter of glistening egg noodles, shards of bacon, and random gobs of sour cream and farmer's cheese. The noodles slip and slide inside your mouth, the dairy products melt and further lubricate, while the bacon explodes in the bland, buttery mass with all the power and smoke of a land mine. You'll stumble from the table overdosed on carbs and enormously blissed-out, and live to feed another day. Andre's Café is an informal refectory that hides behind a Hungarian bakery on the Upper East Side, a place where all manner of luscious strudels, babkas, beiglis (poppy-seed rolls), and flodnis (layers of nuts, apples, and poppy seeds between two sheets of pastry) cavort in the front window. There's no hint that a first-rate eatery lurks within. To make matters more confusing, while the baked goods are kosher, the rest of the vittles—containing pork products and meat-dairy combos—are emphatically not. Skip the baked goods for now, and traipse past yards of display cases to find a narrow dining room. The ceiling is bronze stamped metal, and the left wall is hung with antique kitchen implements and strings of red peppers—from which Hungary's signature spice, paprika, is ground. The right features modern and historic views of identical scenes in Budapest. It's like visiting the Hungarian capital today, then hopping into a time machine. Don't forget to come back for dinner.
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