When Gabor Szalay and Ildiko Beky told friends they planned to open a restaurant with menus inspired by books, the response was unanimous. “Everyone said, ‘Don’t do it!’ ” Ms. Beky recalled. “They said, ‘People will come to read, not to eat.’ ”

They did it anyway. Mr. Szalay, 38, quit his job as a commercial construction technician and went to cooking school. Ms. Beky, 40, scaled back her hours in the real estate business. The couple gutted and renovated a grungy pub in a central Budapest neighborhood. They bleached the wood floors and furnished the space with simple furniture and lighting from Ikea. They built floor-to-ceiling bookcases, which they filled with thousands of mostly Hungarian-language books. The warm and homey result is KonyvBar — loosely, “BookBar” — which they opened in January.

The themed literary menus at the 40-seat restaurant change every two weeks. For a “Fifty Shades of Grey” meal, for example, the couple concocted dishes in shades of gray, like squid ink pasta in cream sauce and a trio of gray-tinted macarons. A caviar cream did double duty as a gray aphrodisiac. An “American Psycho” menu included “narcotic” red chile creamed soup, an oversize “butcher” sirloin steak with a big knife and cheese cake with blood orange juice.

“Gulliver’s Travels” played with contrasting sizes. One appetizer consisted of tiny roasted fish that were eaten whole. A main course featured a one-kilo, 10-inch turkey drumstick that, given its size, was astonishingly tender. “That turkey leg — the meat was so soft it fell off the bone,” said Connie Zhang, an American exchange student dining with friends. Dinner ended with a selection of five mini-servings of dessert.