What happened
The Kárpátia kept six rooms on the ground floor of the Franciscans' bazaar on Ferenciek tere, a block of 1876 and 1877 raised where the friars' convent had stood. A restaurant opened in it in 1877, and the queue for a table is said to have reached the church door. The Spolarich family, caterers of some standing, bought the house in 1925 and had the rooms painted, glazed and furnished in a Hungarian gothic meant to recall the wars against the Turks; the culture minister later protected the fittings. László Károlyi took the lease in 1934 and gave the house the name it still carries. It was nationalised in 1949, passed through the state hotel and restaurant company and then HungarHotels, was refurbished in 1979 and was bought in October 1997 by Ákos Niklai. A band played in the evenings until the closures of 2020. The takings did not come back: Economx and HVG both reported in September 2021 that the restaurant was shut, that reopening had become impossible to plan for, and that liquidation of the operating company had begun the previous November. Its turnover had fallen from 290 million forint in 2019 to 36 million in the first year of the pandemic.
What is there now
An Italian restaurant and bar. OpenStreetMap records Piazza Italia Restaurant & Bar at Ferenciek tere 7-8, run by Pointer Hungary Kft. and open from half past eleven in the morning until midnight every day, surveyed on 2 November 2025. What became of the rooms the Spolarich family fitted out in 1925, which a culture minister protected, is not said by anything traced; the Kárpátia's own website now serves a web agency's holding page.
Location recorded from OSM node/10077982129 — OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL), Ferenciek tere 7-8, the address the restaurant held, 2026-09-12 (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/10077982129).
Sources
- napi.hu
- hvg.hu
- Wikipediahu.wikipedia.org
- openstreetmap.org
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