BTM 13: From Mannheim to Oradea, meals and hotels.
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Hello my name is Mario Alvarez and I am a business traveler. This is episode 13 of the Business Trip Meal Podcast I will report about my two last visits to the city of Oradea in Rumania. This is a complicated trip and can be tricky regarding travel and meals.
One of the customers I follow has a supplier in Oradea. There our materials will be used to produce goods for the consumer industry. In two occasions I had to visit this city to follow the production and support the technicians with some issues regarding surface appearance of the final good.
I live in Mannheim so to get to Oradea I have to drive to Frankfurt, take a plane to Budapest and drive four hours to reach the hotel at the destination. The time needed to do the door to door trip is about ten hours. You can imagine that by the time I enter the room at the hotel I’m really tired. The two times I made this trip I stayed at the Hilton Hotel Oradea. This is a very good hotel. The most important thing for me is the bed, flat and stiff with several pillow options. The second most important thing is food, the restaurant has a very good level, and both dinner and breakfast are good experiences. The people working at the hotel are also very nice. The first time I had dinner there some confusion provoked a thirty minute delay between my first and second course. When I checked out the manager came to the reception to apologize. A very nice extra feature is the swimming pool; it has a decent size so you can almost train like in any regular swimming pool. If this is not enough the hotel is next to a huge aqua park http://www.aquapark-nymphaea.ro/ I have not been there yet but I will put the link on the show notes.
Driving from Budapest to Oradea is a normal ride. The roads are some times of two lanes but I never had any incident. The last visit at the beginning of the summer was not very comfortable because the rental car had a defective air conditioner. It was not able to cool the car so I had to open the windows from time to time just to change the air because outside it was not much colder.
As I said before the food at the restaurant is very good and has a nice variety. I enjoyed very good beef salads or nice salmon always with a pint of the local Ursus beer.
Close to the hotel there are also several options to eat. The first time the owner of the supplier took us for dinner to the Rivo Restaurant http://www.rivorestaurant.ro/ where we enjoyed nice Italian food and very good local desserts like the papanash https://whereismyspoon.co/romanian-cheese-doughnuts-papanasi/ I will put a link to a blog that describes that particular desert on the show notes.
The last time I visited Oradea the customer took us to another restaurant the Meatic like meat with an ic http://www.meatic.ro/ The specialty there is slow cooked meat, mostly smoked. I had smoked ribs with a little portion of fried potatoes. The meat was really fantastic, almost magic. At least to my taste, one of our partners had the same and did not find it that special. I on my side was more than happy.
At the end of both visits I had to go back via Budapest. The first time I took the flight immediately after driving back to the airport for four hours. It was too much so the second time I decided to do the first segment to Budapest the day before. The next day I had a shorter drive to the airport. This allows to have a walk in Budapest which is a very beautiful city. Unfortunately I was lazy in this occasion and did not take the time to do some research to find a typical place with good ratings to try local food. I found a brasserie next to the national theater and asked for a goulash soup.
In my mind it was a safe shot, how in the world can you mess on a local traditional dish. They did, it was quite mediocre. I felt bad, it is not a nice way to express it but it was “good for tourist” level, like a pizza near the Dome in Milan. I missed on finding that little restaurant just know to the locals where food is special, like a nice trattoria far from the big city downtown. Well at least the walk was good for my legs and my eyes.
In Budapest I stayed at the Danubius Hotel. Bed was good.
At the airport I had lunch. From all options I decided to go for a burger at the O’Learys restaurant. It was a good burger.
Thank You for listening. I hope you enjoyed this story, as usual you will find pictures and useful links to the places and meals mentioned in this episode on the show notes at businesstripmeal.com episode 13. On the next episode I will report more about travelling in the European continent. Until that moment I wish you good businesses, great trips and even better meals. Goodbye.