Gulyás Udvar Restaurant and Cellar Wine Bar

Gulyás Udvar stands on Tihany’s main square at Mádl Ferenc tér 2., behind the post office. It has two parts: the restaurant with its own terrace, and next door a cellar wine bar built in 1800. The restaurant serves home-style Hungarian cooking and grilled dishes; the wine bar offers hot dishes alongside a homemade cold platter, bread and dripping, and regional wines.

A restaurant where foreign guests feel at home

The menu is in Hungarian, English and German, with prices in euros as well as forints. Guests repeatedly praise staff who speak English and German, which makes it one of the easiest places on the peninsula to bring foreign friends or family for a proper Hungarian meal. Inside it is a traditional inn with checked tablecloths and old pictures; in summer you sit on the geranium-lined terrace.

From the kettle and the lake

The name is no accident: the goulash soup arrives in a kettle. Alongside: home-style broth in a cup, pumpkin cream soup with roasted seeds and pumpkin seed oil, and catfish fish soup, with roe and milt on request. Among fish dishes there is pike-perch fillet roasted on the skin with creamy spinach and parsley potatoes, and catfish paprikash with ewe-cheese and dill dumplings, which guests single out.

Hungarian mains, served in the pan

The mains are classic inn cooking: confit duck leg with onion mash and braised red cabbage, spicy Tihany pork bits with roast potatoes served in the pan, roast pork knuckle with bean cabbage also in the pan, pork medallions with Dijon mustard sauce and croquettes, grilled garlic pork chop with sour cream and grated cheese, and the “Balaton cutlet”, a breaded chop with roast potatoes. Chicken comes panko-breaded or grilled, and for non-meat eaters there is grilled camembert with jasmine rice and plum sauce. Guests most often praise the stew and the goulash.

Desserts

To finish: cottage cheese dumplings with blueberry sauce and sweet cream, mixed strudel with sour cherry-poppy seed and curd filling and vanilla ice cream, or Gundel pancakes.

The cellar wine bar and drinks

The wine bar is next to the restaurant in a two-hundred-year-old cellar. Wines by the glass and bottle come from the region, the pálinkas from Pannonhalmi Pálinkárium. Non-drinkers get homemade lavender, elderflower and mint-lemon balm syrups, and Tihany lavender wheat beer is among the beers.

What guests say

4.7 on Google from nearly 1,500 reviews and 4.4 on Tripadvisor from about a hundred. Guests praise the flavours, generous portions, fair prices, attentive multilingual staff and the atmosphere. The few but more mixed Ittjártam reviews complain about flies and mosquitoes on the terrace and occasionally cleanliness and slow service.

Who it is for

Anyone looking for a classic Hungarian lunch in central Tihany, especially those bringing foreign guests. Good for families too: every dish comes as a half portion. If you want special, modern cooking, other places on the peninsula will suit you better.

Prices

Mid-range: mains cost roughly 5,500-7,100 forints on the 2026 menu, with no service charge.