Ibolya Espresso Budapest

Ibolya Espresso is a normal retro bar with a terrace in a beautiful area of Budapest. It tries to show the mood of the good old times, and it manages to do it well.

But the reason I love this place is that here I can drink an old-school Hungarian fizzy drink: Bambi.

Bambi was born two years after World War II, in 1947. The drink was so popular, they had to import a machine from the GDR to accelerate production. But after that, we got Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and their popularity killed Bambi in the year 1968. Two years later, instead of Bambi, Pepsi was being manufactured by the East German lines at Margitsziget in the Metropolitan Mineral Water and Ice Industry Company. Bambi came out again in the early 2000s, made in small quantities by the Budapest Spa and Hévizei Zrt.

But on the tests there was a little problem with it: the old Bambi fans said that the tarry aftertaste was missing. Yes, Bambi had a tarry aftertaste (nowadays it doesn't), because during the times of shortage economy Bambi would sometimes be made from rotten orange oil (and rotten orange oil has a tarry aftertaste).