It's an everybody-knows-your-name kind of place — even if they don't know your name. The Hungarian-American Cultural Center was founded by refugees from the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956, and that's who it still caters to, along with their children and grandchildren.

On one wall there's a map of Hungary in its glory days (it's smaller now). In the restaurant, open only on Friday evenings and Sundays noon to 6 p.m., you're as likely to hear Hungarian spoken as English. Some folks are there twice a week, every week. Members can take advantage of the full bar. Little girls take Hungarian dance lessons on Friday nights. One of my companions said that being there took him back to the Knights of Columbus halls of his youth.

What will you get there besides vicarious nostalgia? Good, solid meals, mostly in the $7 range. Portions are generous — a platter of mild and juicy stuffed cabbage with dumplings, for one person, was so well-filled that our sociable volunteer waitress had to bring an extra plate, as any attempt to dig in would have touched off an avalanche.

In earlier centuries, the Hungarians borrowed foods from the Turks (phyllo, which became strudel; stuffed peppers; paprika) and the Austrians (pastry). Head cook Elizabeth Krajcz (pronounced kroits), who came here 29 years ago, says, "Every Hungarian meal is a lot of work. You have to put your heart in it to be a good food." For her daughter's wedding, Krajcz baked 30 kinds of cookies and used 140 eggs to make a special hand-rolled noodle for the soup.

Some of the from-scratch dishes her chalkboard is likely to list are stuffed cabbage, chicken or veal paprikash, gulyas palacsinta, pork loin, breaded pork, porkolt and, on Fridays, a non-Hungarian fried pollock dinner with fries. On Sundays, each order comes with house-made chicken noodle soup and a salad.

One of your best bets, and one of the smaller meals, is gulyas palacsinta. Get this straight: gulyas (goulash) is soup. The beef, pork or veal stew that many non-Hungarians call goulash is pörkölt. Krajcz or her assistant Helen Pozsgai makes a satisfying beef soup with a rich orange broth. (And a ham-and-bean soup special one Friday was even better — thick and just salty enough, with dumplings.)

Palacsinta are buttery crêpes, filled with cheese or apricot jam or both. They're made to order, of course, and come warm to your table. I recommend combining a bite of one with the other. The bland cheese (mostly puréed cottage cheese and a bit of sugar) is a wonderful foil for the warm, sticky, almost-too-sweet jam, which the restaurant buys by the bucket from the 30-year-old Hungarian Strudel Shop in Allen Park.

You can get dumplings and gravy here with just about anything. Quite different from the fluffy mounds my mother steamed on top of her chicken stew, Hungarian dumplings are small squiggles, formed by pressing an eggy dough through the holes in a special metal plate. Think of German spaetzle; Pozsgai says she uses 50 eggs each week. This is the essence of comfort food.

The dumplings accompany chicken paprikash, which includes three or four pieces of chicken, and are optional with stuffed cabbage (mashed potatoes or fries are the other choices). The paprika flavor in the peach-colored chicken gravy is pretty subtle, making this a bland, and comforting, dish.

Even starchier (and thus more comforting) are kaposztas teszta, cabbage noodles. To make this peppery dish, fry shredded cabbage in oil and fry boiled egg noodles in bacon grease. Mix together, salt and pepper, and it's as satisfying a guilty pleasure as you're likely to find. The noodles are infused with the mild cabbage flavor. Five bucks will get you a big plate, and it's even better the next day.

Hungary is known for its desserts, and you may find dios torta, made with ground walnuts, or dobos torta, a caramel-topped eight-layer cake, on the board. Just $1.50 got us two slices of dense and delicious walnut roll. Twenty-one-layered strudel from the Strudel Shop, with fillings of apples, cheese, cherries, walnuts or apricots, is sometimes on hand.

This fall the Cultural Center will celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution with poetry, dance and proclamations. And food. Wonder how many eggs they'll crack?

The restaurant will be closed Labor Day weekend.

Jane Slaughter dines for Metro Times. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.