There’s a version of Jánosi Zsolt that the city sees. He’s the executive chef at ISSEI, the new Nikkei-style Skybar & restaurant floating above the Basilica, on the top of the Radisson Collection hotel. The man behind plates that carry Japan and Peru in the same bite. That version is real. But there’s another one, softer and harder to photograph, and it’s the one worth sitting with.
A Rich Resume
His résumé reads like a flight log. One year in Japan — the experience that put him at the helm of a Nikkei kitchen years later. Twelve years in Austria. Short spells in America and Germany. Then home, to a sous-chef post at Gundel, right up until COVID pulled the shutters down.
He doesn’t dress any of it up. The Japan year mattered. The friendship with the general manager mattered too — they’d already worked side by side, so when ISSEI came calling, the trust was already there. Talent opened the door. The handshake walked him through it.
Where the Chef Eats
Ask him where he eats, off the clock, and he doesn’t reach for anything fancy. He reaches back. To the 6th district, where he grew up, to a little spot that wasn’t really a restaurant at all — just beer, bread, and a fat Debreceni sausage. That’s it. No twist, no tweezers. He’ll tell you, plainly, that it might be the best market food there is. After Japan, Austria, America, Germany, and Gundel — after all of that, the meal Jánosi Zsolt loves most still costs about the same as a couple of tram tickets.
He’s honest in a way that’s almost disarming. Ask for his favorite Hungarian restaurant, and he stalls, genuinely. “Hungarian is a hard question,” he says. He lands on Stand 25. Asked about others, he throws in Essencia, then lights up the moment the conversation turns to Asian kitchens. Hachi gets the real praise. A creative kitchen, he says, and you can hear that he means it.
Then there’s the wine. He’s surrounded by it, can point you to a white to go with the pork anticucho without a pause — but for himself? “I’m not a wine guy.” Beer, every time. And even that comes with a shrug, because he barely drinks at all. Maybe ten times a year, he figures. Maybe less.
A chef who’d rather hand you a cold beer than a wine list. That tells you something.
A True Barbeque Man
Strip away the rooftop and the DJs and the skyline, and you find a guy with three kids, a house near Gödöllő, and a garden he calls huge. Two boys, one girl, the youngest. The family ice cream spot is a small pastry shop in Dunakeszi called Chili — ten, fifteen minutes from home, a regular pilgrimage.
He’s the only one who cooks. His wife doesn’t, and he likes it that way. “It’s my kitchen,” says Zsolt. For him, dinner is five minutes of work, no drama. The kids eat everything — they’re wild for seafood, shrimp, octopus, pasta. And he grills constantly. A true barbecue man, he says, and the big garden exists for exactly that.
He even makes his own kürtőskalács. Has the grill for it, the whole setup. Learned it well, though he’ll tell you straight: his mom still makes the best. Real butter, tons of lemon. That’s the one he loves.
That last detail lingers. A traveler who circled half the world and came back to grill in a village garden. A skybar chef whose favorite meal costs the price of a sausage at the market.
The spotlight finds him at ISSEI, where the lights come on, and the DJs play and Budapest glitters below. But the truer light is smaller. It’s the fire out back, three kids running through the smoke, a Hungarian evening folding in around him.
