§ Issues
18
Dispatches filed and counting — for the line, not the lounge.
Freshly grilled
File · pricing
7 Oct 2026 · 5 min read
The soundtrack to a $60 loaf of bread
Alexei wrote the album playing in New York's most talked-about bakery. Here is how that happened, why a Graz bread chain went viral, and what background music legally costs you in Hungary, Romania and Austria.
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From this issue →
The line, in their words.
Latest dispatches
Pull · § 01
The soundtrack to a $60 loaf of bread
→ pricing
Pull · § 02
The perks and complications of running a restaurant with foreign staff
→ budapest
Pull · § 03
Summer ends, the labour shortage changes postcode
→ jobs
Until last month, Martin Auer's organic bakery chain was largely unknown outside Graz, Austria's second-largest city, where it is based and runs most of its branches. These days it is global viral material, because of its new New York outpost, RYE, or rather because of the $60 price tag on its signature rye sourdough.
For me (Alexei here), the story began in December 2023, when an email asked whether I'd write copy for the shop. It was going to be not just an upscale bakery but a European concept store: besides bread, there'd be ceramics, loafers and glassware from niche but high-quality producers in Austria, Germany and Spain. My commission was to talk to them all and write it up the way I write for Monocle. One of the producers was GEA Waldviertler, the Austrian shoemaker whose founder, Heinrich Staudinger, once invented his own currency before running, unsuccessfully, for president.
One meeting drifted from texts to the question of what music the shop would play. Martin Auer, who was there, said he would ideally like specially made music playing at all times, Monday to Sunday, just as there were specially made interiors and imagery. Everyone, me included, replied that this wasn't humanly possible in the timeframe: you'd need several bands working nonstop for years, or an extraordinarily prolific composer. Still, I said, I could try. The most I could do was an album of seven or eight songs.
This wasn't entirely spur of the moment. I am a musician. I have been in bands, and have a solo project, Alexei Korolyov & the Single Pieces (the single pieces being the friends who play with me). It also turned out Martin liked much of the same music I do: the Beatles, 1960s rhythm-and-blues, Neil Young. The one reference we agreed on was Young's minimalist, guitar-driven soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's 1995 Western Dead Man. A bakery with a Jarmusch soundtrack, I thought. How great is that?
The result is not quite as dark, and I am in no way comparing myself to Neil Young. You can listen to the album (for free) on
The idea was a song for each day of the week, plus one extra, just in case. Hence the titles: Wednesday, Why?, Thursday Soon and so on. They play at anchor points through the day, marking the change from morning to midday, midday to afternoon.
So far it seems to be working. There are even people Shazaming the songs, although they may simply be trying to find out who wrote such rubbish. All I can say for myself is that it feels great to be given free licence to create, and to have the result played on repeat in New York, of all places.
The family behind the $60 loaf
§ 02 · Recent issues
From the plancha.
Bi-weekly · All issues →
budapest
3 min read
The perks and complications of running a restaurant with foreign staff
At Budapest’s Goli, Petra Saás says the daily anxiety about who will turn up has largely gone. An international team, English as the working language and recruitment through expat Facebook groups are central to the story.
jobs
4 min read
Summer ends, the labour shortage changes postcode
The season closed, the people who ran it are between contracts for six weeks, but some already have a start date in Tyrol.
menu
4 min read
Her product strategy was to get banned by the Orthodox Church
How Central Europe's most sacred dishes became its best marketing assets.
heatwave
5 min read
Heatwave menus and 50°C kitchens, Bucharest under water and the treacherous Austrian sausage
Record heat, flooded basements, carcinogenic sausages, an ice-cream shortage, and kitchen life at 45°C in five reels.
water
5 min read
Do you charge for tap water during a heatwave?
Charging for tap water, or refusing it outright, is a margin decision, a reputation decision and sometimes a legal decision. Across our three markets, these are starting to collide.
inflation
4 min read
The tenderloin comes off the menu before its price goes up
Third and final in a three-part series: operators in Romania, Hungary and Austria on how they set prices, defend margins, and read a guest who is spending less. We finish in Vienna.
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The files.
§ 03 · The rooms in the kitchen
- 01 menu Dispatches filed under menu. 6 issues →
- 02 pricing Dispatches filed under pricing. 5 issues →
- 03 interview Dispatches filed under interview. 4 issues →
- 04 plancha express Dispatches filed under plancha express. 3 issues →
- 05 inflation Dispatches filed under inflation. 3 issues →
- 06 jobs Dispatches filed under jobs. 2 issues →
§ 04 · The line is talking
Operator takes.
Quotes from the line
pricing
"The soundtrack to a $60 loaf of bread"
— Alexei Korolyov, Georgiana Ilie, Zsofi Bajor
budapest
"The perks and complications of running a restaurant with foreign staff"
— Zsofi Bajor
jobs
"Summer ends, the labour shortage changes postcode"
— Zsofi Bajor, María Paula Ángel Benavides, Alexei Korolyov, Georgiana Ilie
menu
"Her product strategy was to get banned by the Orthodox Church"
— Georgiana Ilie, Zsofi Bajor, Alexei Korolyov, María Paula Ángel Benavides
heatwave
"Heatwave menus and 50°C kitchens, Bucharest under water and the treacherous Austrian sausage"
— Zsofi Bajor, Georgiana Ilie, Alexei Korolyov
water
"Do you charge for tap water during a heatwave?"
— Georgiana Ilie, Zsofi Bajor, María Paula Ángel Benavides
inflation
"The tenderloin comes off the menu before its price goes up"
— Alexei Korolyov
Until last month, Martin Auer's organic bakery chain was largely unknown outside Graz, Austria's second-largest city, where it is based and runs most of its branches. These days it is global viral material, because of its new New York outpost, RYE, or rather because of the $60 price tag on its signature rye sourdough.
For me (Alexei here), the story began in December 2023, when an email asked whether I'd write copy for the shop. It was going to be not just an upscale bakery but a European concept store: besides bread, there'd be ceramics, loafers and glassware from niche but high-quality producers in Austria, Germany and Spain. My commission was to talk to them all and write it up the way I write for Monocle. One of the producers was GEA Waldviertler, the Austrian shoemaker whose founder, Heinrich Staudinger, once invented his own currency before running, unsuccessfully, for president.
One meeting drifted from texts to the question of what music the shop would play. Martin Auer, who was there, said he would ideally like specially made music playing at all times, Monday to Sunday, just as there were specially made interiors and imagery. Everyone, me included, replied that this wasn't humanly possible in the timeframe: you'd need several bands working nonstop for years, or an extraordinarily prolific composer. Still, I said, I could try. The most I could do was an album of seven or eight songs.
This wasn't entirely spur of the moment. I am a musician. I have been in bands, and have a solo project, Alexei Korolyov & the Single Pieces (the single pieces being the friends who play with me). It also turned out Martin liked much of the same music I do: the Beatles, 1960s rhythm-and-blues, Neil Young. The one reference we agreed on was Young's minimalist, guitar-driven soundtrack for Jim Jarmusch's 1995 Western Dead Man. A bakery with a Jarmusch soundtrack, I thought. How great is that?
The result is not quite as dark, and I am in no way comparing myself to Neil Young. You can listen to the album (for free) on
The idea was a song for each day of the week, plus one extra, just in case. Hence the titles: Wednesday, Why?, Thursday Soon and so on. They play at anchor points through the day, marking the change from morning to midday, midday to afternoon.
So far it seems to be working. There are even people Shazaming the songs, although they may simply be trying to find out who wrote such rubbish. All I can say for myself is that it feels great to be given free licence to create, and to have the result played on repeat in New York, of all places.
The family behind the $60 loaf
A Balaton trader interviewed by G7 last month described his year: work the lake to the end of August, a short break in September, then Austria for the winter. In summer 2024, Hungarian citizens were 11.5% of everyone employed in Austrian accommodation and gastronomy, the largest foreign group in the sector. Romanians were another 3.7% and only 41.3% held an Austrian passport.
So the labour market in the first week of September may not be a whole lot easier than the summer, certainly not for long.
The people who ran the terraces at Balaton or Mamaia are back in Budapest and Bucharest, and a good share already know where they will be in a few months, when the winter season starts. You have six to ten weeks before ski resorts take your options away.
Think in shifts instead of seasons
Giggle is a Budapest platform where employers post individual shifts and workers apply for them: 160,000-plus registered users, Romania since last year. We spoke to co-founder Ádám Sebestyén.
Ioana Mihai had a fantasy about her product launch: the head of the Romanian Orthodox Church would publicly condemn it. Free national press, instant notoriety, the perfect stunt. It never happened, nobody protested, but her funeral cake still sold.
'Colivă' is the dessert that closes funeral and commemoration meals across southern and eastern Romania: boiled wheat berries with sugar, citrus zest, vanilla, rum and a great deal of ground walnut, decorated with an Orthodox cross. To be served, it has to be blessed by a priest. Ioana grew up with it and at eight announced she'd start a colivă business so she could finally eat her fill.
In 2022, aged 32 and working as a marketer, she did. She bet her generation would buy nostalgia and tourists would buy novelty, developed variants with fruit, chocolate, jam, nuts and - for Halloween - black tahini, and launched in 2024 as Mori, colive de viață ("Die! Colivas for living").
Sales have swung between a few hundred and 4,000 units a month but now Carrefour and Freshful have now picked it up for distribution, which completely changes the math.
Her explanation of success: it's good colivă. Her grandmother's recipe, traditional enough for the nostalgic, daring enough on the toppings to pull in the curious.
She's not alone.
Once a dish becomes iconic enough in this region, it gets stuffed, wrapped, deep-fried, turned into a burger or a pizza.
Some become bestsellers, others perhaps, should never have happened.
Today, we'll show you both the absurdity and the real economics at play.
Hungary: 'lángos' as national monument
Hungary's two most bastardised foods, 'lángos' and 'kürtős kalács' (chimney cake), share a foundation: simple yeast dough. Once people love the base, anything can be built on top.
Welcome to Plancha Express, we have six quick summer stories about the weather, restaurants and hospitality during a heatwave:
- The kitchen at 50°C
- Menus for the heatwave
- Under water in Bucharest
- Your grill sausage may be working against you
- Austria is running out of Eskimos
- Five reels from inside the heatwave kitchen
The kitchen at 50°C
Last week, Hungary recorded its hottest day ever: 42°C in the northeast, above 41°C in Budapest, a nationwide heat alert, and water restrictions in several regions. The heat became enough of a public concern that Prime Minister Péter Magyar called on shopping centers, retailers and restaurants to offer drinking water to anyone who needed it.
For operators, the real story starts behind the dining room.
A 38°C day outside translates into 45–50°C inside a kitchen.
At that point heat stops being an inconvenience and becomes an operational risk: staff wellbeing, food quality, service speed, and ultimately profitability.
Governments are starting to treat it that way. According to a Reuters overview, France, Spain, Germany and Italy have introduced or strengthened rules requiring employers to adapt working conditions during heatwaves: extra breaks, adjusted schedules, drinking water, cooling. Hungary has no hospitality-specific heat rules yet, but employers remain responsible for safe working conditions under general labour safety law, and authorities routinely recommend free water, more frequent breaks, reduced physical workload and adequate ventilation.
Operator take: Ask every member of your kitchen team one question: "what makes your station unbearable above 35°C?", the fixes usually cost less than you expect, and better extraction and cooling may return more than your next oven.
Menus for the heatwave
A downtown Budapest steakhouse, a hot afternoon in June, a table booked for a birthday. One guest arrives early, sits down, and asks for a glass of tap water. The waiter says, politely, that the house only serves bottled mineral water. The guest doesn't drink bottled water and declines. When the rest of the party arrives, they talk it over for a minute and, birthday or not, leave to eat somewhere else.
The margin on a bottle of mineral water is real, but so is the bill for a table of six that walks out before ordering. How many bottles do you have to sell to cover one reservation that turns around at the threshold?
The water costs almost nothing, serving it does.
The liquid itself is effectively free.
But the glass doesn't pour, carry and wash itself.
An illustrative breakdown from the Austrian Economic Chamber's Burgenland branch put the water inside a €1.80 bottle of mineral water at about €0.38, and the tap-water equivalent at €0.001, while staff (€0.52) and overheads (€0.52) were identical in both columns. The figure is old and not a benchmark, but the structure is correct: you aren't selling water, you're selling the labour, glassware, washing, ice and breakage around it. Refusing tap water doesn't protect a product margin, it’s the service you've decided not to give away.
What customers are willing to pay for
When beef tenderloin got too expensive, Mochi didn't raise the price, it took the dish off the menu.
Sandra Jedliczka is one of the founder-owners of Mochi, arguably the best Japanese fusion restaurant in Vienna. Since opening in 2012, the portfolio has grown to include the Asian gourmet shops omk, Mochi Ramen Bar, Kikko Bā (Spanish-Japanese tapas), Cucina Itameshi (Italian-Japanese), a Mochi outpost in Bolzano, and Chicken Karate, a fast-food stand at Vorgartenmarkt. Across all of it, pricing runs on one rule: the menu price moves last. Some dishes never carry the increase and some leave the menu rather than carry it.
In this conversation:
- how Mochi works through purchasing, suppliers and recipe adjustments before a price ever moves,
- why its best-selling dishes are allowed to run below margin target as a matter of identity,
- and why lunch, not any single menu category, is where the squeezed consumer first stops showing up.
§ Files
37
Rooms in the kitchen — operations, customers, industry and the rest.
§ Cadence
Bi-weekly
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§ Price
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§ 06 · Who's on the line
Written by operators, for operators.
For people who run restaurants, hotels, and hospitality businesses in Central Europe.
Zsofi Bajor
I’m a Budapest-based hospitality innovator and food storyteller with a rare dual background: 15 years in television and media and a second career building real-world food concepts that change how people eat.
15 issues filed
Georgiana Ilie
Bucharest
Journalist and anthropologist looking at how food influences our world.
14 issues filed
Alexei Korolyov
13 issues filed
Peter Erdelyi
Budapest-Vienna
8 issues filed
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