Szimpla Kert: Free to Enter, Open Until 4am, and Best at an Hour Nobody Tells You

Szimpla Kert costs nothing to walk into, opens at 15:00 on weekdays and closes at 04:00 every night of the week. That is the whole answer to the question most people arrive with, and it is worth saying plainly, because the ruin bar that started the entire category charges no entry fee, takes no bookings, and is at its best during hours when almost nobody thinks to go.

What follows is the practical version: hours by day, what the chalkboards actually charge, the door rules that catch people out, the Sunday market, and how this place differs from the two other ruin-bar pages you have probably landed on.

Hours, and the one week of the year it shuts

Day	Open
Monday to Friday	15:00 to 04:00
Saturday	12:00 to 04:00
Sunday	09:00 to 04:00

The Sunday 09:00 start is not an early bar. It is the farmers market, which has the run of the courtyard until 14:00 and then hands the space back.

Szimpla shuts completely on 23, 24, 25, 26 and 31 December. The 31st is the one that ruins plans: a great many guides still send people to Kazinczy utca for New Year’s Eve, and the gate is locked. If that is the night you are planning, the Instant-Fogas comparison is the page you want instead.

Hours and closure dates from Szimpla’s own site, read 15 September 2026.

What it costs, board by board

Szimpla prices its drinks on hand-painted chalkboards, and the charming consequence is that the boards do not all agree with each other. The courtyard bar, the upstairs bar and the wine bar each keep their own list, and the same spirit can differ by a few hundred forint depending on which queue you joined.

What	Price
Draught lager, 0.3 l	1,900 HUF (about $6)
Draught lager, 0.5 l	2,200 HUF (about $7)
IPA, wheat beer, doppelbock, cider, 0.5 l	2,500 HUF (about $8)
Alcohol-free lager, 0.5 l bottle	2,000 HUF (about $6)
Mad Scientist cans (milk stout, double IPA, sour honey beer)	2,500 to 3,000 HUF (about $8 to $9)
Spirits at the courtyard bar, 4 cl	2,800 to 3,000 HUF (about $9)
Spirits upstairs, 4 cl: vodka, whiskey, rum	3,000 HUF (about $9)
Spirits upstairs, 4 cl: gin, tequila, Hungarian rum	3,500 HUF (about $11)
Single malt, Laphroaig 10 or Glenfiddich, 4 cl	4,000 HUF (about $13)
Pálinka, 4 cl	3,000 HUF (about $9)
Cocktails on the main boards: Negroni, Whiskey Sour, Long Island, Zombie, Mai Tai	5,500 HUF (about $17)
Pink Fizz, or an alcoholic slushy	4,000 HUF (about $13)
Wine by the glass, dry white or dry red	2,600 to 2,800 HUF (about $8 to $9)
Wine bar, Hungarian list, 100 ml pour	from 1,200 HUF (about $4)
Soft drinks, still or sparkling water	1,100 HUF (about $3)
Smash burger with fries and sauce	5,800 HUF (about $18)
Quesadilla, flautas or curry wurst	4,800 HUF (about $15)
Two dips with pita and vegetables	4,200 HUF (about $13)
Grill plate for two	9,800 HUF (about $31)

The shape of that list explains where the bill goes wrong. Beer has held its line and reads as fair for a city-centre bar that costs nothing to enter. Cocktails are firmly in cocktail-bar territory without being in a cocktail bar, and shots of anything add up faster than they look. Order the beer, or go to a place built for the other thing: the city’s serious mixing happens in the cocktail bars guide, and the genuinely cheap drinking happens in the local pubs.

The wine bar deserves its own mention, because it is the part of Szimpla that behaves least like a ruin bar. It keeps a printed list of small Hungarian producers, Somló furmint, Badacsony pinot gris, Tokaj zéta, Káli Kövek from Köveskál, poured at 100 ml or sold by the bottle from around 9,000 HUF (about $28). It sits upstairs, it opens later than the courtyard, and hardly anyone photographing the Trabant ever finds it.

Prices are in HUF, which is what you pay at the counter. Converted at 1 USD = 317 HUF, the ECB rate on 15 September 2026. Rates move, so treat the converted figures as indicative. All figures from Szimpla’s own drinks and food boards, read 15 September 2026.

The queue, and why a free bar has one

The building holds 580 people, guests and staff together, and the door counts heads in and out continuously to stay under it. Once it is full, entry becomes one out, one in. That is the entire mechanism, and it fires on Friday and Saturday nights and almost never otherwise.

So the queue is not a velvet rope and there is nothing to skip your way past on an ordinary Tuesday. The venue does sell a wristband that gets you in ahead of the line, arranged by email rather than at the door, and the number of nights a year when it is worth the trouble is small.

The simpler fix is the afternoon, and it is the one instruction about this place worth repeating. From opening until about eight in the evening the courtyard is a garden with a bar in it, you can see the ceiling, the light comes through the tarpaulins, and every room is walkable. After midnight at the weekend it is a full house against that cap, with a line outside waiting for someone to leave, which is also a real experience, just not the one the photographs sold you.

Sunday morning is a completely different venue

Every Sunday from 09:00 to 14:00, the courtyard becomes the Szimplakerti Háztáji Piac, a producers’ market with 30 to 40 stallholders a week. Everyone selling has grown or made what is on the table: cheese, honey, jam, cordial, vegetables, mangalica and game, fresh and dried mushrooms, truffle, spices and spreads. There is live music, usually jazz, world or folk, and a supervised children’s corner with activities that change with the season.

Yelkrokoyade, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The part worth knowing about is Közös Lábos, the shared pot. A different civil-society organisation cooks at the market each week from ingredients on sale that morning, usually one meat dish and one vegetarian, and you eat for a donation that goes straight to that organisation. It is the least ruin-bar thing in the building and it has been running for years.

If your week in Budapest includes exactly one visit to Kazinczy utca and you have any flexibility about when, make it this one. Free, calm, full of Hungarians, and the same rooms.

Market day, hours and stallholder detail from Szimpla’s own market page, read 15 September 2026.

The door rules that catch people out

None of these are obscure, and all of them surprise somebody every night.

• Age. Under-18s can come in unaccompanied until 20:00. Between 20:00 and 22:00 they need an adult with them. After 23:00 only over-18s may be inside. No alcohol to anyone under 18, and the bar can ask for ID.
• The door check. Security may look through bags and clothing, and anything they judge risky is handed in for the duration. They can also refuse entry outright for drunkenness, dress or behaviour, which is worth knowing if your evening started at 15:00.
• Nothing from outside. Food and drink bought elsewhere cannot be brought in or consumed anywhere on the premises.
• Smoking is allowed only in the designated area, not wherever the courtyard happens to feel outdoors.
• Dogs are welcome, but they go home at 20:00, and they cannot come in during the Sunday market.
• No self-service at any bar, no matter how long the wait looks.
• Do not photograph the staff. Guests are fair game to the venue’s own photographers, and if you would rather not be in a shot, say so and you will not be.
• Groups. An organised group arriving in the evening has to be arranged ahead at szimpla@szimpla.hu. Turning up with 25 people and a guide is how a group gets turned away.
• Football is not shown, as a matter of policy, and the venue is cheerfully unapologetic about it.

Door rules, including the ban on food and drink brought in from outside, from Szimpla’s own house rules (házirend) at szimpla.hu, read 15 September 2026.

Cards are taken. There is a cash machine in the first recess to the left of the entrance if you want forint in your pocket.

The rooms, which are the actual reason to come

The Kazinczy utca building was a stove factory and a set of flats, derelict and scheduled for demolition, when the Szimpla owners took it over in 2004. They opened it as Szimpla Kertmozi, an open-air cinema, because what they had was a large courtyard and a projector. The bar grew around the cinema rather than the other way round, which is why the layout still makes no commercial sense and why that is the best thing about it.

Two decades of accumulated objects later, it runs over two floors and about a thousand square metres: the courtyard with the gutted Trabant, the bathtub seating, side rooms branching at angles, a stage, a gallery, a shisha bar, the wine bar, and corridors hung with disco balls and things nobody can explain. The single most useful instruction anyone can give you here: walk every room and every floor before you buy a drink. Most first-timers get as far as the courtyard, take the Trabant photograph, and never find the upstairs at all.

While you are up there, look for Széphalom, the literary garden of Kazinczy utca. It is an audio anthology of contemporary Hungarian writing, read by actors, and the way you take it home is by buying a Széphalom beer, a dry-hopped lager brewed by Rekettye. The street is named after Ferenc Kazinczy, the man who reformed the Hungarian language and renamed his own village Széphalom, which is either a very deep joke or the most sincere thing in the building.

Two things nobody advertises. The toilets are not a strength and are not always stocked, so use the ones at your restaurant before you come. And service is uneven: warm and quick at one bar, flat at the next, on the same night, so the bar you pick changes the evening more than the drink does.

Szimpla, Instant-Fogas and the rest of the ruin bars

Three pages, three different questions, and it is worth knowing which one you are asking.

Szimpla Kert is the original and the cultural one: free, open from the afternoon, a market on Sunday, concerts most nights, and a crowd that is international and good-natured rather than dedicated to going out. It is a place to look at, with a bar attached.

Instant-Fogas is the other end of the format: a seven-floor complex with 18 bars, built for a night out, ticketed on the big dates, and the venue that actually runs the New Year’s Eve party Szimpla does not. If you want dancing until the metro restarts, that is the address, and the head-to-head comparison lays out the difference in full.

The rest of the district is where the locals mostly are. Szimpla is one of ten in the ruin bars guide, and several of the others are quieter, cheaper and a five-minute walk away. If your group is in town for a stag or hen weekend, read the party bars guide first, because Szimpla’s door has opinions about large groups in costume.

Getting there

Kazinczy utca 14, District VII, in the middle of the Jewish Quarter. Metro M2 to Astoria is about five minutes on foot, and M2 to Blaha Lujza tér about seven. Astoria is also the interchange for trams 47, 48 and 49 and trolleybuses 72 and 74, and the 74 runs up Király utca, one street over. Once the metro stops for the night, trams 4 and 6 on the Grand Boulevard run through until morning, which matters at a bar that closes at 04:00.

If you drive, the venue points people at the car park on Nagy Diófa utca. If you cycle, there are racks in front of the building and a camera-watched rack about fifty metres away, and Szimpla takes no responsibility for either.

Sources: Szimpla’s own site and its drinks and food boards, market page, house rules and 2024 safety plan at szimpla.hu, all read 15 September 2026; the Széphalom project at szimpla.hu/szephalom, read the same day; transport interchanges at Astoria cross-checked against the station’s connection list, read 15 September 2026.