My wife, Brigitta and I, started Brigitta’s Hungarian Restaurant in 2017. We are so honored to have the best clients. People make our place their go to for dates, anniversaries, and birthdays. Many, so many Hungarians pop in weekly.

During this COVID episode we are in, I have used the extra time to research our Csabai (cha-buy-ee) family heritage. In doing so, we have traced our ancestry to Attila the Hun. In the old Hungarian way, family names meant something. Our family name Csabai means “of Csaba” (cha-ba).  Csaba was one of Attila’s sons. Csaba means “a gift from the heavens”.

Growing up as a military brat, moving was all my family knew. A new place almost every year was our norm. Mom always cooked Dad’s favorite meals. It was just dinner to us kids. As we grew older, we could hear our parent’s special guests go on raving about how good the my mom’s food was. I still recall some French Astronautics Society members at our home making such a big deal, with their heavy accents, about mom’s homemade Chicken Paprikas (pop-ree-kash). Perhaps it was those moments, that I started to pay attention to her cooking; watching her scrape dough off a cutting board into boiling water, pulling apart a whole boiled chicken, making her sauce, rolling cabbage, etc. She would tell me “nuggets” of what made a meal special. She took great pride in cooking.