Too Cool for School | Ruin Bars

When you hear the word ‘ruin’ you are probably expecting to see some old crumbling building, right? Everyone in person and online raves about the ruin bars in Budapest, so for some reason I was imagining cave like bars. In my humble opinion, there is only one ruin bar worth its salt and that is Szimpla Kert. ‘Cool’ doesn’t even begin to cover how awesome this place is. On Sundays, this two story bar turns into a farmers market where you can sample honey, cheese, jerky and purchase vegetables with a beer on the side if you like. There were two bars that were serving beer, one upstairs and the other downstairs and in one of the upstairs rooms there was a buffet breakfast available. If you find yourself in need of a seat, there were plenty of unconventional choices like a bathtub, bicycle, hot tub or car seats in addition to normal bar stools of course. I am grateful to have visited the bar in daylight, the decor is funky and there is so much of it in every room you could stay there for hours studying it. If this place was so lit during the day, I couldn’t wait to see what it was like at night. We made sure to get there a little early to avoid waiting in a long line. The place was packed and a live band played throwback music. We got beers for about one Euro each which was pretty exciting. After table hopping from room to room and singing along with the band we called it a night. On our walk back to our AirBnB we thought about stopping into other ruin bars to see if any could compare but from the looks of it none could and kept on raving about our night.