No one’s entirely sure whose idea it was for the team from Marrickville’s Baba’s Place to take over Randwick’s longstanding Hungarian restaurant, Corner 75, in partnership with the owner of Stanmore’s three-hatted Sixpenny. What is certain is that it began, like many ideas do, with a series of half-joking texts between mates.

When the restaurant was first put up for sale in mid-2024, a chef friend sent the listing to Sixpenny owner-chef Daniel Puskas, who is Hungarian on his father’s side. Puskas forwarded screenshots to Baba’s Place chef Jean-Paul El Tom in between chats about gelato; El Tom’s business partner Alex Kelly saw the pics, became excited, and told Puskas he should buy it. Puskas wavered. El Tom suggested they could help.

Corner 75, which has been a fixture of Frenchmans Road for more than 40 years, will reopen under their joint stewardship in the coming months. Framed football jerseys on the restaurant’s walls helped seal the deal – Corner 75’s jumbled decor is, among other things, a passionate tribute to Hungarian soccer and legendary footballer Ferenc Puskas.

“I went in with Dan [Puskas] and it was crazy,” says El Tom. “The walls are exactly the same shade of red as the walls at Baba’s Place. The photo frames are the same. I get pretty excited about lots of things, but this really felt like it was worth getting excited about. It felt like an omen.”

Puskas remembers taking his 10-year-old son Ira to eat at Corner 75 one day. Ira asked the restaurant’s owner Paul Varga if he could get a photo beside the jersey that bore his name, but Varga went one better. He popped around the back of the bar and presented Ira with a plaque of the player. The little boy was thrilled. “He keeps it next to his bed,” says Puskas.

Generations of families have gathered at Corner 75 over the past four decades, ordering generous plates of chicken paprikash and stubby nokedli dumplings, and clinking glasses of furmint wine. Varga, who bought the restaurant in 2012, worked the floor, greeting his guests with handshakes and kisses and playfully admonishing them for dripping sauce on the tablecloth or not finishing their food. His sister Katalin ran the kitchen. After so many years front-of-house, Varga is now ready for a break.

“We have friends whose parents had their first dates there,” says Kelly. “The wonderful [late Hungarian-born football journalist] Les Murray was a regular. It’s a really significant place. A lot of our conversation was about: ‘How do we legitimise ourselves when entering into a Hungarian stalwart, a big marker of the community?’” (Kelly has already begun work on a series of short films spotlighting prominent Hungarian-Australians, such as footballer Dez Marton and local wine expert Mike Bennie.)

Although Puskas has Hungarian heritage, the Italian side of his family was more prominent in his childhood and he had never cooked Hungarian food – neither had El Tom. The two chefs got their hands on The Cuisine of Hungary, a seminal 1971 cookbook by Hungarian restaurateur and food critic George Lang. From there they started playing around with the cuisine’s classics, including schnitzel, goulash, cucumber salad and lecso, a type of vegetable stew similar to Sicly’s caponata.

El Tom and Puskas also embarked on a two-week research trip to Hungary in August, where they devoured sunshine-splashed peaches and tomatoes (“better than any I’ve ever tasted,” says El Tom) and fatty mangalica pork. El Tom, a flower fanatic, became obsessed with the fields of sunflowers he saw everywhere. “So expect to see sunflowers and sunflower seeds in a lot of different ways,” he says.

For Corner 75’s next era, the kitchen will be modernised, but the soul of the interiors will remain, including the hundreds of photos, posters and archival objects that celebrate Hungary and Hungarian-Australians. “I put it in the contract that those must stay,” says Varga.

Alice Tremayne, former restaurant manager of Attica in Melbourne, has been tapped for general manager and wine-buyer, while Carley Scheidegger, former head pastry chef at Fred’s in Paddington, is on board as head chef. The new menu will be built around traditional recipes cooked with top ingredients, and everything from sour cream to strudel will be made in-house. The paprikash is set to star Sommerlad heritage-breed chicken, and schnitzels will be crumbed to order. Scheidegger is also hoping to wheel out Hungary’s intricate eszterhazy torta cake on a trolley.

More seafood is expected on the new menus, such as confit tuna or barbecued fish served on top of the lecso. Kelly acknowledges that landlocked Hungary is heavily focused on meat, but notes that many Hungarian immigrants who came to Australia would incorporate seafood into their meals. “The very nature of migration facilitates a need to adapt to your environment,” he says.

The changes, seafood or otherwise, may not be the easiest transition for every Corner 75 regular, which the newcomers are acutely aware of.

“I do think some of the older generations may hesitate to go there any more because these young kids are taking over,” says Puskas. “But we don’t want to say goodbye to them. Come and see what we are doing. If you want a big bowl of goulash, we’ll do that. If you want sausage on the lesco instead of fish, we’ll do that too. We want Paul to be proud of us, to come into the bar and have a Unicum [a type of Hungarian herbal liqueur] and be part of it.”

El Tom says: “We want to tell a story of Hungary, of Paul and of Randwick. We want to tell our own story too, but most of all we want to celebrate Corner 75.”