Öreg Prés

Galloway at the station in Mór

The Galloway beef reaches the pass as the house’s defining material; Ben Tham, chef at Öreg Prés in Mór, works inside that measure of restraint. His cooking is described through discipline and repetition rather than display, a useful fit for a restaurant that asks old Hungarian and Swabian forms to carry a modern edge. The public record around his training and mentors is quiet, so the lineage here is read through the plate and the house rather than through named apprenticeship. Öreg Prés gives him a particular frame: a renovated peasant-house property in the Mór wine region, attached to Öreg Prés Butikhotel, where a country kitchen vocabulary meets a more composed pass. The menu holds to familiar structures, starters, mains, desserts, and drinks, but the work is not nostalgic in a soft way. Húsleves keeps boiled meat, vegetables, and pasta in view. Szarvas pörkölt comes with porcini mushroom dumplings and beetroot salad. Ragacsos kacsamell filé brings duck breast to cherry jus, purple cabbage cream, and pak choy. The chef’s hand matters most in that kind of translation, where too much polish would flatten the source and too little would leave the dish in memory rather than service.

A beef program tied to the house

The restaurant’s strongest claim is material rather than decorative: it serves Galloway beef specialties from its own farm, and the house presents itself as the first restaurant in Hungary to feature that ancient, half-wild breed on this footing. That fact gives the kitchen a spine. Érlelt bélszín steak sits alongside the wider Galloway program, while the rest of the menu moves between pan-fried pike-perch fillet with fish soup sauce, rolled farmhouse chicken in mushroom sauce, pork loin with mangalica bacon and confit potatoes, and veal schnitzel with green salad and crispy potatoes. The method is direct, often built from pan, stew, roll, jus, dumpling, and cream rather than abstraction. Desserts keep the same conversation going: Öreg Prés somlóija with nutty grillage and matured rum-chocolate sorbet; túrógombóc with confit lemon and sour cream foam; regional cheeses with quince chutney and walnuts. The wine program stays close to Hungarian bottles, particularly the Mór region, with the cellar and old press giving that choice a physical anchor.

The room around the old press

The room carries age without turning it into theatre. Öreg Prés works within a historic property described as a 17th-century inn and renewed peasant houses, with old furniture, a peaceful garden terrace, and the country-life atmosphere of the surrounding hotel. A 300-year-old wine press and cellar sit at the center of the story, not as a prop, but as a reminder that this part of Mór has long understood food and wine as adjacent disciplines. Inside, the tone is rustic and homey; outside, the inner court and garden soften the movement between table and cellar. The Márton House museum, near the terrace, keeps Swabian everyday life within sight of the meal. That closeness matters. A plate of venison stew, a glass from the Mór wine region, and the old press belong to the same house.