One bowl, one story

Nock'N'Cheese was born out of a lucky accident. The idea started from the classic mac and cheese: we wanted to create a nokedli with a really characterful cheese sauce.

During development we once left the cheese sauce and the nokedli warming together in the pan for too long — and that is when the magic happened. The cheese crisped up underneath, while the top stayed silky and stretchy.

That is how Nock'N'Cheese came about: crisp and stretchy at once, a mistake that has been one of our most popular dishes ever since.

Vadas made it onto the menu from Ádám’s childhood — it was a regular at the family table.

Broth was cooked often in the family, and the kind worth coming home for: Ádám’s mother made a famously good matzo ball soup, the main course at every larger family occasion. And from the leftover soup vegetables, vadas practically made itself.

Vadas has been a shared family favourite ever since — and that is what we decided to share with our guests.

When Nokedlish opened, we deliberately avoided the dishes that are classically served with nokedli. There was only one exception: nokedli with egg was simply impossible to leave out.

Our guests, however, thought differently. In the Vas utca shop the question came up again and again: when will there finally be paprikás or pörkölt? Many hold that nokedli is only worth eating with stew — and that is exactly what we wanted to disprove. And we did: the tomato, the vadas and the creamy spinach nokedli quickly became guest favourites.

Paprikásh only made it onto the menu with the Dob utca opening — and it is no accident that it took so long. Every household does it differently, and everyone believes their own recipe is the best. We kept experimenting until our own, tastiest version was born.

Putting nokedli with egg on the menu was almost self-evident. It is the dish that feels familiar in every Hungarian household — grandma’s Sunday lunch, the light spring-afternoon main course, with the sweet-and-sour salad as an almost obligatory companion. A true classic, unchanged for generations.

There was another goal too: we wanted to offer a dish that is available to anyone at any time and can be an everyday lunch — simple, familiar, always a good call.

The shape was a question for a long time. Should it simply be nudli, just because the form is similar? In the end the answer was no: after a long development process the sweet nokedli base was born, a dessert base in its own right that can carry any number of sweet toppings.

Zserbósh nokedli came first, with walnut, dark chocolate and apricot jam — it set up the first winter season of Nokedlish. The star of the current line-up is Mákosh nokedli, with fresh vanilla custard and homemade sour cherry jam — a worthy summer successor to the first.