Rétes in Budapest: 5 Strudel Counters, Prices and Hours (and the One That Closed)

Rétes in Budapest is a counter snack sold by the piece, not a dessert you order in a grand café, and a piece costs 710 to 1,200 Ft, roughly $2 to $4. Look for it in dedicated rétes shops, bakeries and market stalls, not in the coffeehouses.

Pick by what you need: Első Pesti Rétesház if you want to sit down and try savory fillings, Rétescake for the lowest verified price, Budavári Rétesvár if you are already in the Castle District. Ignore any list that quotes 270 to 450 Ft, which is about a third of today’s price, or that still sends you to Strudel Hugó on Kertész utca, which has closed permanently.

Prices are in HUF, which is what you pay at the counter. Converted at 1 USD = 313 HUF, the ECB rate on 4 September 2026. Rates move, so treat the converted figures as indicative.

📋 Budapest Rétes at a Glance

Shop	District	Price per piece	Note
Rétescake (3 shops)	III / II / IX	710 Ft apple, 890 Ft cabbage	Webshop prices, three Budapest shops
Hetes Rétes	III	790-890 Ft	Delivery price
Első Pesti Rétesház	V	1,000 Ft, or 3,800 Ft plated	14% service charge on top when you sit down
Rétesbolt Anno 1926	XIII	1,000 Ft, 1,200 Ft seasonal	Seasonal fillings cost more
Budavári Rétesvár	I	1,100 Ft	Delivery price, in the Castle District

Illustration generated for this guide. It shows the five classic fillings, not any particular shop’s counter.

Do Not Look For Rétes In The Grand Coffeehouses

If you take one thing from this page, take this one. Rétes is not a Gerbeaud dessert-menu item. It is a counter item, sold by the piece, in dedicated rétes shops, ordinary bakeries and market stalls. Every curated list of good rétes in this city is built from those, plus one hillside büfé, and none of them is a grand café.

If a grand café is what you actually want, the Dobos torte guide is the right page for that, and the wider Hungarian dessert round-up covers what the salons are genuinely good at.

1. Első Pesti Rétesház: The Sit-Down One

The only entry here that works as an actual destination rather than a stop. It runs the widest filling range in the city, classics alongside genuinely odd ones: chicken, foie gras, salmon. If someone in your group insists rétes is always sweet, this is where you settle it.

A plain piece is 1,000 Ft to take away. The à la carte menu lists the same 1,000 Ft but also states that its prices do not include a 14% service charge, so eaten at a table the piece comes to 1,140 Ft, about $3.60 (checked October 2026). There is a premium version at 3,800 Ft (apple with cold cinnamon sauce and whipped cream, sour cherry with chili chocolate, raspberry and curd with salted caramel), but that is a garnished plated dessert, not the same piece marked up, and the service charge applies to it as well.

• Address: Október 6. utca 22, District V
• Price: 1,000 Ft a piece to take away, 1,140 Ft at a table with the 14% service charge. Plated dessert versions 3,800 Ft plus service
• Boxes: 3 pcs 3,300 Ft, 6 pcs 6,400 Ft, 10 pcs 10,500 Ft, 20 pcs 20,500 Ft from their own webshop
• Hours: Daily 10:00-23:00 per their own site. The Wolt delivery window is narrower at 10:00-20:00, minimum order 2,000 Ft
• Link: reteshaz.com

Prices and hours read on reteshaz.com and its webshop, 19 October 2026.

2. Rétesbolt Anno 1926: The Specialist, Turning 100

A proper single-purpose rétes shop on Lehel utca, and according to its own website it turns 100 in 2026.

Twenty-one fillings are listed, several flagged seasonal, described on their own site as house-made and hand-stretched. At 1,000 Ft a piece: walnut, poppy, curd, apple, plum, sour cherry with white poppy, cabbage, pumpkin and poppy, apple and poppy, sour cherry and poppy, rice pudding with chocolate, rice pudding with seasonal fruit, and seasonal roasted pumpkin. At 1,200 Ft: mango, sour cherry, blueberry, raspberry, apricot, strawberry, blackberry and pear, all seasonal except the apricot.

Here is the useful detail: the same piece is a flat 1,100 Ft on Wolt. Not a rule about Budapest pastry, just a real gap at this shop, verified on the same day from both sides.

• Address: Lehel utca 38, District XIII (their own site prints 1133 twice, some directories print 1135, so use the street address)
• Price: 1,000 Ft standard, 1,200 Ft seasonal at the counter. 1,100 Ft flat on Wolt
• Hours: Mon-Sun 10:00-20:00, including public holidays, per their own site. The Wolt delivery window is narrower at 10:00-18:00
• Link: retesbolt.hu

Fillings and prices read on retesbolt.hu on 7 November 2026.

3. Rétescake: The Cheapest Verified Counter

Three Budapest shops, and the lowest price traceable to a primary source: 710 Ft for apple, 890 Ft for cabbage, both taken directly from their own webshop product pages. Those are webshop figures and in-store prices may differ.

All three Budapest shops list their regular hours (checked October 2026).

• Óbuda, Flórián tér 6-9, District III: Mon-Fri 09:00-19:00, Sat 09:00-18:00, Sun 09:00-15:00
• Lövőház utca 12, District II: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, closed Sunday
• Mester utca 87, District IX (in the Praktiker car park): Tue-Fri 10:00-15:00, Sat-Sun 10:00-17:00, closed Monday
• Price: 710 Ft apple, 890 Ft cabbage, from their own webshop
• Link: retescake.hu

One clarification, because some listings place it inside the hall: the Lövőház utca shop is on the corner by the Fény utca market, not a stall inside the hall. There is no rétes stall inside that market. Every “rétes at Fény utca” hit is actually this retail unit.

Rétescake hours read on retescake.hu and prices on retescakeshop.hu, 19 October 2026.

4. Budavári Rétesvár: The Castle District Option

The only entry up in the Castle, a short walk from Fisherman’s Bastion, and tiny with minimal seating. Their homepage says they make their rétes on site from natural ingredients, which puts them in a group of two on this page (the other is Rétesbolt) where that claim comes from the shop rather than from an aggregator.

Fillings on their own site: curd, curd and apricot, apple, sour cherry, poppy and sour cherry, plum, cabbage, and savory curd with dill. The delivery listing also has kenyérlángos with bacon or salami at 1,950 Ft and a cheese and sour cream pogácsa at 790 Ft if you want something savory and larger.

Two caveats, both worth carrying. The 1,100 Ft is a delivery price. Their own site publishes no prices, so check the walk-in counter price in person. And their opening hours disagree with themselves: the Instagram bio says open every day 08:00 to 20:00, while the delivery listing shows open until 19:00. Plan around the earlier one.

• Address: Balta köz 4, District I
• Price: 1,100 Ft a piece on Wolt. Check the counter price in person
• Hours: “Open every day 08:00-20:00” per their own Instagram bio. Delivery listing says until 19:00
• Link: budavariretesvar.hu

Fillings read on budavariretesvar.hu, 19 October 2026.

5. Hetes Rétes: Cheapest On The Delivery Listing, In Óbuda

Out on Bécsi út, advertising 22 flavors and “90% filling”. Curd, apple, sour cherry and sour cherry with poppy are 790 Ft; poppy and cabbage are 890 Ft.

Those are delivery-listing prices; confirm the counter price in the shop. The status signal is mixed too: the delivery listing is live with current prices and the Facebook page is active, but their own domain, hetesretes.com, does not resolve. Check the listing before making a special trip.

• Address: Bécsi út 136, District III
• Price: 790 Ft curd / apple / sour cherry / sour cherry-poppy, 890 Ft poppy / cabbage, all from the delivery listing
• Hours: Mon-Fri 10:00-18:00, Sat 09:00-15:00, closed Sunday

Three More That Exist, With No Price Attached

These are real places without a current verifiable price, so they are named without one. They are still worth a visit, so check prices at the counter.

Normafa Rétes Büfé (Eötvös utca 59, District XII). The hillside classic, covered in full in the Normafa guide. Its Facebook page is active with no closure flag, but every numeric price found traces back to aggregators and reads as stale, and no schedule is published anywhere. Go for the walk and the view; treat the price as whatever is chalked up when you arrive.

Házi Rétesbolt (Pozsonyi út 15, District XIII and Karinthy Frigyes út 4-6, District XI). Status unresolved. Against it: the domain does not resolve, the shop’s own last Facebook post is a COVID reopening notice from April 2020, and it is on no delivery platform. For it: an active company registration. Phone before you go, on +36 1 330 6668.

Szépvölgyi Rétes, stall F118, ground floor of Lehel Csarnok (District XIII). The market-stall entry, a named stall at a verifiable location, with no published price found. Useful update for anyone who read our lángos guide and its call-ahead warning: the market’s own site confirms it trades daily except public holidays, and that the 2026-2029 renovation is being done in the evenings and at weekends without closing the hall (checked October 2026).

The Great Market Hall also has ground-floor stalls selling rétes, but none of them trades under a name worth sending you to, so the hall gets no entry of its own here. The markets guide covers it instead.

The One That Closed

Strudel Hugó, Kertész utca 22, District VII, is permanently closed. The domain no longer resolves, a Hungarian directory flags it as ceased, and it has been removed from Wolt.

It is still on most of the strudel lists ranking for this search, so check the date on any list that includes it.

Which Fillings Follow the Seasons

Most rétes fillings are not seasonal at all. A few are.

Hungarian	English	Season
túrós	curd cheese	Year round
mákos	poppy seed	Year round
almás	apple	Year round in practice, apples store
diós	walnut	Year round
káposztás	cabbage, savory	Year round
szilvás	plum	Fresh plums, roughly August to October
áfonyás	blueberry	Fresh blueberries, mid-July to late August
meggyes	sour cherry	On every counter all year, fresh harvest late May to end of July
sárgabarackos	apricot	Fresh apricots, June to July
szedres / málnás	blackberry / raspberry	Summer, some raspberries return in September
tökös-mákos	pumpkin and poppy	Pumpkin season, September to November

The one to know: meggyes is the iconic Hungarian filling and it is available all year, but fresh-picked sour cherries only go into it from late May to the end of July. The rest of the year it is made from frozen or preserved fruit, and it is perfectly good. It is just not what the postcard implies. Treat those boundaries as approximate rather than a calendar.

And since túrós is the filling most visitors have no reference point for: túró is a fresh curd cheese, closest to quark, drier and tangier than cottage cheese, and made differently from ricotta, which comes from reheated whey rather than curds.

Where Rétes Actually Comes From, Minus The Folklore

The popular story is that baklava traveled up through the Ottoman Empire into Hungary and on to Vienna, where it became Apfelstrudel. It is repeated everywhere, always with a “believed to” or a “presumably”, and never with a citation. The one rigorous ethnographic source on Hungarian rétes does not make the claim at all. The story is popular, but the evidence for it is thin.

What is documented is narrower and more interesting. The Hungarian ethnographic record describes rétes as soft dough stretched by hand across a table until it is membrane-thin, brushed with fat, filled, rolled and baked, historically a festive peasant pastry filled with apple, plum, walnut, cabbage, turnip or white beans. Layered baking techniques show up in 17th-century aristocratic Hungarian cookbooks. The oldest surviving strudel recipes, a Millirahmstrudel and a turnip strudel from 1696, sit in a handwritten cookbook at the Vienna City Library. And the earliest solidly dated Hungarian source naming rétes types (túrós, rizses, mákos, almás, káposztás) is Simai Kristóf’s handwritten cookbook from Selmecbánya, 1795 to 1799.

You will see 1549, 1590 and 1662 quoted as Hungarian first mentions. They come from uncited blogs and contradict each other, so this page leaves them out.

One correction: rétes is not a Hungarikum. It holds no national Hungarikum status, and there is no EU traditional specialty registration for it either. What exists are local-tier entries in municipal value registries for specific regional products and events: Rózsa rétes in Mórahalom, Pusztasomorja’s poppy seed rétes, strudel-baking at the Vasvár Rétes Festival, the Hasznos strudel festival. Where the word turns up next to rétes, it is used colloquially, not as a legal status.

Rétes Versus Apfelstrudel, In Practice

Same paper-thin stretched dough. Three real differences.

Filling range. Savory cabbage and potato are core traditional here, and the whole túrós family has no standard Viennese equivalent. Rétes is not always sweet.

Format. It is sold by the piece as an everyday snack, not served as a plated dessert course. That is why the price is 710 to 1,200 Ft and not four thousand.

Where you buy it. Dedicated shops, market stalls, bakeries. See the entire list above.

Two more things visitors get wrong. Rétes is not kürtőskalács, which is spit-roasted sweet yeast dough and structurally unrelated; if that is what you are after, our chimney cake guide is the right page. And warm is not guaranteed: at small dedicated shops with fast turnover, straight-from-the-oven is common and worth timing for, while room temperature is the ordinary Hungarian default everywhere else.

If you are in town in December, the Christmas markets sell it too, at 1,900 to 2,000 Ft, which is still the best-value dessert on those squares. Our Christmas markets guide has the rest.