Szimpla Kert

Szimpla Kert opened in a modest form in 2002, when a group of students set up a cheap, informal bar in a courtyard on Kertész utca with no particular ambition beyond low prices and a relaxed atmosphere. Its popularity outgrew that first space quickly, and in 2004 it moved to its current, much larger location on Kazinczy utca — a derelict building slated for demolition that had previously been a stove factory and later crumbling apartments.

Rather than renovating the building conventionally, the founders leaned into its decay: mismatched secondhand furniture, an old Trabant car repurposed as seating, salvaged bathtubs, a wall of vintage televisions and a sprawling, ever-changing layer of street art and graffiti across multiple rooms, courtyards and levels. This aesthetic — deliberately unpolished, built inside abandoned pre-war buildings in Budapest's Jewish Quarter (District VII), which had large numbers of empty, decaying buildings in the 2000s — became the template for what's now known globally as the 'ruin bar' genre, and Szimpla remains the original and most famous example.