The chef and the kitchen behind Aura
Whoever plates it also comes to the table
You do not read where the produce came from on a card. We tell you as the plate goes down.
Head chef
Almási Bálint
The kitchen is led by Almási Bálint, who turned to whole food plant cooking after ten years in meat led fine dining, and opened Aura in 2023.
Bálint grew up in a village in Zala county, in his grandmother’s larder, where winter meant whatever the summer had put away: pickles, dried fruit, vegetables kept under fat. He trained as a cook in Budapest, then spent ten years in meat led kitchens, at home and for two years in Copenhagen. It was there, months into running the section that handled vegetables, that he realised no one was taking the most abundant ingredient all the way. He opened Aura in 2023 for that reason: a restaurant where vegetables are not a side and not a substitute, but the course itself. No meat analogues, no processed replacements; what is on the plate is called by its own name.
A course here usually starts with a phone call: the grower says what is good in the ground right now. Bálint takes a single ingredient and works it for weeks — raw, over embers, fermented, slow cooked — until he finds the form in which it can carry a course on its own. Only then does it reach the menu, and it stays only as long as the season allows. Where it came from and why it turned out the way it did is not told by the printed card but by Bálint or the sommelier, at your table.
How the kitchen works
Three rules we do not bend
-
No substitutes
No meat analogues, no processed replacements. What reaches the plate is vegetable, grain, seed, mushroom or fruit, under its own name.
-
Time instead of tricks
Depth comes from fermentation, long cooking and embers. Some of our ingredients have been working in the larder for two hundred days.
-
We tell it at the table
Every course carries a story, and it is not the printed card that tells it but the chef or the sommelier, in person.
Sommelier
Gálffy Hunor
The wine list is put together by Gálffy Hunor, who came from the Küküllő valley in Transylvania and has been Aura’s sommelier since it opened.
Hunor grew up beside a small estate in the Küküllő valley and moved to Budapest at nineteen, first to the floor, then to the cellar of a wine led restaurant. He came to natural wine when, after years of large, heavily worked bottles, he started looking for what still moves in the glass. He visits around thirty estates a year in person, buys from the core growers vintage after vintage, and always keeps a few bottles back for the tasting menu. Pairing for him is not a finished list: he brings the glass to the course, tells you why it is that one, and if it misses, another one arrives. He builds the alcohol free flight — fermented juices, teas and kombuchas from the kitchen — with the same care.
Reservations
The table is yours for as long as the evening lasts
We are open Tuesday to Saturday. The last table is seated two hours before closing so the menu has room to finish.