Hungarian Butcher serves hefty helpings of comforting, treasured family recipes
I’ve been a fan of every project Dan Varga has been a part of. Well, at least every Dan Varga project that I’ve known about, because the guy has been busy over the past decade.
Throughout the years, though, Varga has largely adhered to an admirable ground-up aesthetic: Sourcing high-quality ingredients from local farms that he chops, butchers, smokes, pickles, ferments and scratch-cooks into delicious food.
Some of the stops along Varga’s journey include being chef at late lamented eateries Double Comfort Restaurant and The Explorers Club, as well as collaborating with Wario’s Beef and Pork to create fantastic sandwiches and working closely with James Anderson — the pit boss of Ray Ray’s Hog Pit — to raise heritage-breed hogs and make outstanding sausages.
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Early this year, Varga launched his latest major project called The Hungarian Butcher, a boutique butcher shop on Dublin-Granville Road near Linworth informed by treasured family recipes. On the operation’s website, beside a photo of Varga doing a peek-a-boo through a curtain of hanging sausages, is a quote that starts: “Opening The Hungarian Butcher shop is a lifelong dream of mine.”
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That dream has come true with a terrific store that has a contemporary look but an old-school ethos. The Hungarian Butcher also has a frequently busy open kitchen surrounded by glass cases of premium meats — many with their local farm origins identified — plus loads of house-made sausages and other charcuterie items such as duck pastrami, tasso ham and wagyu hot dogs. The shop’s regular client list includes all-stars such as The Refectory (whose kitchen Varga previously worked in), Watershed Kitchen & Bar and Ginger Rabbit (the chic jazz club launched by the owners of Chapman’s Eat Market).
As you might expect, Hungarian-style products are featured. What you might not expect — and this almost seems like a secret because it hasn’t been publicized much — is that The Hungarian Butcher serves restaurant-style, hot comfort food dishes from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Wednesdays through Fridays.
Like gulyas leves ($12), known as “goulash” elsewhere and often called the national dish of Hungary. The shop’s version was a deeply savory, crowd-pleasing beef stew with long-cooked tender meat, potatoes and carrots in a drinkable broth scented with paprika and slightly tweaked with chile. As with every delicious hot dish here (and mentioned below), it comes with mashed potatoes so good that I forgot what the other standard side option was (not really — it’s rice, which I’m sure is nice).
Chicken paprikash ($16) was another skillfully made Hungarian classic. Aligning with the shop’s focus on highlighting meat rather than overshadowing it, I received a huge piece of fork-tender breast awash in a relatively light and tangy, paprika-tinged gravy that tasted more of chicken stock than sour cream.
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The cabbage rolls were similarly hearty but not ridiculously rich ($17 for two). Cooked-to-tender cabbage leaves loosely covered paprika-tinted, hefty logs of ground meat and rice. Leavening the dish: fragrant spicing, a relatively light tomato sauce and acidic white wine-like notes (I was assured wine isn’t in the recipe). If a cross between such meat logs and chicken paprikash sounds good — it is — try the meatball paprikash ($16, with four house-made pork meatballs).
While practically big enough to split, any hot dish could be lunch or dinner for two by tacking on some refrigerated, ready-to-eat delicacies.
That lengthy inventory includes: cucumber salad ($5) — thin discs in a zingy, dill-speckled sour cream sauce; inhalable potato salad ($5) — firm spuds in a creamy, mustard-animated dressing enriched with chopped egg; gyulai kolbasz ($16 a pound) — classic salami-style smoked Hungarian sausage, characteristically seasoned with hot and mild paprika and caraway seeds, that tasted like first-rate kielbasa; HB pastrami ($22 per pound) properly fatty, smoky and redolent of corning spices; and chile-spiked but nuanced and altogether excellent Hungarian-style house pickles ($14 for a large container).
Hungarian Butcher
Where: 2177 W. Dublin-Granville Road, Linworth area
Contact: 614-600-2254; www.hungarianbutcher.com
Hours: 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Sundays; closed Mondays
Price range: $12 to $17
Ambience: modern boutique butcher shop with an old-school soul, high-end and house-made products, a frequently busy open kitchen and friendly, helpful service
Children's menu: no
Reservations: no
Accessible: yes
Liquor license: no
Quick click: Skillfully cooked, crowd-pleasing hot comfort food dishes are among the Hungarian-style treats featured at this terrific shop owned by a veteran chef.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: The Hungarian Butcher offers prepared dishes from family recipes
