Hungarian cuisine has certainly come a long way since the drab decades of communism when portion sizes were regulated by the state and meat was served with rice and potatoes to fuel the workers toiling in heavy industry. A new generation of chefs is re-inventing the classics of Hungarian cuisine such as goose liver and roast duck, with a lighter touch. Downtown Budapest is crowded with lively bars and bistros, offering everything from modern Magyar to high-end dining at the Michelin starred Onyx.

But it is Hungarian wines that are really garnering serious attention. Hungarian varietals such as Kekfrankos (a medium bodied red) and Furmint (a dry, full-bodied white) are coming of age, says Thomas Howells, of the Budapest Wine Society. “Hungarian winemakers have wine in their veins. The wines are taking a middle course between the big often bland wines of the New World and the thinner traditional wines. Hungarian wines have fruit and character.”

Zwack Unicum
The black bitter digestif in the bomb-shaped bottle, made to a secret recipe held by the Zwack family.

Turo Rudi
Dark chocolate around a bar of dense, sweet cottage cheese. The taste of a Hungarian childhood.

Kalocsai paprika
The finest red pepper powder, available in sweet or hot varieties. Essential for every goulash.

Eros Pista & Edes Anna pepper paste
“Strong Steve” and “Sweet Anna” add zest to soups and casseroles or can be spread straight onto bread.

Pick salami
Hungary’s most famous cured meat product, from a company founded in 1869 and savoured by gourmands everywhere.

Tokaji wine
Known for centuries as the “King of wines and wine of kings”. A new generation of boutique producers such as Oremus has modernised high-quality production.

The opening of the ultramodern Skycourt at Ferenc Liszt International Airport linking Terminals 2A and 2B has firmly established Budapest as a regional aviation hub. Designed by the acclaimed Hungarian architect Zoltan Tima, the shell-shaped glass and steel building is bright and spacious, with huge windows and extensive shopping and dining facilities.

Skycourt used enough steel to build a sports stadium to make a building that’s a world away from the narrow, poky corridors of the old airport. “Skycourt was constructed to change the experience of flying,” says Jost Lammers, the airport’s CEO. Passengers and airlines agree.

Last year Budapest airport registered an 8.9 per cent traffic increase with a record 8.9 million passengers. Long-haul travel is also increasing. Qatar Airways has opened a direct flight from Budapest to Doha and American Airlines flies direct to New York. New routes also opened to Riga, Latvia, and Berne.

Budapest is home to one of the great hotels of the world – the Gresham Palace Four Seasons. The Art Nouveau former apartment building has been restored to its fin-de-siècle glory and is now a city landmark. But it’s a rare example of style among a sea of functional modernism.

The prime stretch of riverfront on the Pest side is occupied by the Sofitel, the Intercontinental and the Marriott, all virtually indistinguishable in their blandness, although the Buddha-Bar Hotel, in a restored downtown historic palace nearby, promises to spice up the market. On the Buda side, the Lanchid 19, which has won several design awards, offers comfort and modernism. The Racz Thermal Spa, scheduled to open this spring, is built around a 16th century Ottoman hamam.

Investors should look at the comparative lack of mid-range, boutique hotels in downtown. The popularity of new mid-market hotels, such as Bo18 in the up and coming District VIII, shows there is a market.

You would have to search long and hard to find a Hungarian under 30 who still buys a newspaper. But almost everybody reads index.hu, the country’s most popular news portal. About 400,000 unique users click on the site every day, attracted by its mix of serious political and economic news, gossip and celebrity coverage. It’s also refreshingly irreverent about Hungary’s rulers. It’s a breath of fresh air in a country where politicians expect deference from journalists.

Unlike the highly partisan newspaper press, index.hu is critical of all governments, whether left or right-wing. “The Hungarian press has a bad heritage. The main papers were connected to political parties in 1989 and that has not changed,” says Peter Magyari, a journalist covering European politics.

Hungarian artisans have long prided themselves on their careful craftsmanship. Labour costs remain comparatively cheap by western standards and there are still bargains to be had here. A pair of handmade Vass shoes, in calf leather or suede, starts at €390, while made-to-measure costs from €590.

For less formal attire and accessories check out wamp.hu which has details of Budapest’s monthly design and fashion fairs, featuring up-and-coming designers and artists such as Krisztina Kuti and George Radic.

The best known work of the Nobel laureate for literature. A powerful, semi-autobiographical story of a teenage Jewish boy and his odyssey through the Nazi death camps.

An evocative erotic memoir of post-war Budapest and a callow young man’s surprisingly successful search for love and sex from understanding female elders.

Koestler was born and went to school in Budapest before writing the seminal work on communism and the Stalinist show trials, drawing on his own experience as a prisoner in Fascist Spain.

Epic, highly praised account of the lives of three Hungarians and their families across the 20th century and the havoc wreaked upon them by history.

First of an atmospheric trilogy set in 1930s Budapest, featuring crime reporter Zsigmund Gordon, peeling away the glitter to reveal the city’s darkest secrets under the darkening shadow of Fascism.

An enthralling genre-busting mix of reportage, memoir and travelogue, as Zilahy, an acclaimed poet, travels through the region in the 1990s.

Hrivnak works froma studio in downtown Budapest but her village roots shape her life and her style. Hrivnak, 37, was born in Totkomlos in southeast Hungary, 230km from Budapest, into a family of seamstresses.Now one of Hungary’s leading fashion designers, Hrivnak makes womenswear incorporating traditional elements. All the hand embroidery is done by elderly ladies in Totkomlos. “My target group is women who want to be elegant. But I try to keep the traditions of my home village by incorporating the folk motifs that people wore in my childhood, that I learned to sew as a girl.”

It’s a rare high-school friendship that evolves into a solid and successful business partnership but Peter Farago and Balazs Benedek, two of Hungary’s most innovative young entrepeneurs, are used to ignoring accepted wisdom. Farago, 35, and Benedek, 37, are the founders of easyling.com, a crowd-sourced website translation service. Website owners can submit their site to easyling.com at the touch of a button. Easyling then outsources the translation work to its 20,000-strong team, enough to translate most websites in a few hours. “What people want is to go to sleep and see their website translated overnight. We do it for them,” says Farago.

In a parliament that is overwhelmingly male, middle-aged and socially conservative, Timea Szabo, an MP for the green-liberal LMP party, is easy to spot. She is one of just 34 women MPs out of 386, a lower proportion than in Mali or Bahrain. Szabo, 35, spent several years working in Afghanistan and Pakistan for international aid agencies before studying at Harvard. Such a global perspective is rare among Hungary’s often provincial elite. “We didn’t want to be politicians. We came from civil society or human rights organisations. But we never thought that civil liberties would be in danger again,” she says of the government’s centralising drive.

Flora Hevesi has gone from reporting the news to making it. A former journalist for state television, she resigned soon after the right-wing Fidesz party won a landslide victory in 2010. Now president of Amnesty International in Hungary, Hevesi, 33, has long been an activist in civil society and the green movement. She was one of the founders of LMP (Politics Can be Different), a new green-liberal party that came from nowhere to win 16 seats in 2010. A parliamentary career seemed to beckon but she decided against it.

Zoltan Bogathy, founder of the Culinaris chain of gourmet food shops, is changing the tastes of a nation. Stocked with everything from artisan pasta to sushi ingredients, Culinaris takes a novel approach in a city where service is still often sullen. Bogathy, 42, was born in Cluj, in neighbouring Romania. “Food was central under Ceausescu because there was so little of it,” he recalls with a wry smile. His target customer is the new generation of younger Hungarians, in their twenties and thirties, who travel and have spent time living and working abroad. In such a conservative country, the new tastes he’s bringing represent a food revolution.