Civilized caffeination

A frothy tour of Vienna’s coffeehouses

Ysenda Maxtone Graham
Spectator (US), May 15, 2020

This article is in The Spectator’s May 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to

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Palaces, art galleries, parks, composers’ houses, operas, concerts, Spanish
Riding School horses, full-throated choirboys wearing sailor suits…yes, I
go to Vienna for all these delights. But, deep down, probing my true
desires and motives, I really go there for the coffeehouses. It’s just that to
make the coffeehouse experience the most delicious it can be, you need to
arrive cold, hungry, intellectually stimulated and with aching feet from
visiting one of the above attractions.

Then you’ll feel the warmth seeping into you as you sink down onto a
coffeehouse banquette. Because who on earth would choose to sit on one
of the exposed central tables, with hard wooden chairs, when you can sit
around the edge at a table in a window bay, on a seat as comfortable as the
softest 1930s railway carriage seat?

The atmosphere of the great old Viennese coffeehouses — they seem to

have been founded between 1824 and 1899 and are mostly still in private
hands — is uniquely delightful. I’ll try to get to the bottom of why.

Depressing though it is, it almost helps (for contrast’s sake) that there are
now 13 Starbucks outlets in Vienna. Nip into one of those for 20 seconds,
just to remind yourself of the weird Starbucks muffiny smell, the lines, the
sameness in whichever country you are, the need for a receipt code to use
the bathroom, the buckets of milky calories being handed out, the always
disappointing sawdusty flapjacks. Why would anyone go to a Vienna
Starbucks (though lots do, for familiarity’s sake) when you could go to
Demel, the Landtmann, the Bräunerhof, the Frauenhuber, Prückel, the
Schwarzenberg or the Tirolerhof, all of them elegant havens where a
waiter in black tie and black waistcoat will look after you in just the right
way, with the perfect degree of attention?

They look like they’ve been working there for decades, those waiters, all
of them men. I did speak to one having a quick cigarette outside the
Frauenhuber; he had indeed been a coffeehouse waiter for 48 years. But
they’re not pompous like the café waiters in Paris or Cannes who pretend
not to notice you for the first 25 minutes. They’re quietly, proudly,
charmingly Viennese, and they want you to have a nice time and not feel
pressed to vacate your table. So, hang your coat on the nearest wooden
coat-stand, sit down and watch how the locals do it. They wander in,
sometimes alone, sometimes with a partner or friend. Many of the men
look like Stefan Zweig, who used to do exactly this. Their actions have an
air of the habitual. They take a newspaper from the row of newspapers
hanging from a rail, each clasped in its wooden newspaper-holder. They sit
down and read their paper of choice, drinking their habitual coffee of
choice, either alone or in companionable silence, pausing (if with a
partner) only to discuss the review of a performance of a string quartet
they’ve just heard. It’s all extraordinarily civilized.

What makes this sharing of newspapers in wooden clasps so special? I

think they enhance the sense of givenness, the sense of sharing the
information of the day and the feeling of ‘absolutely no rush’. There’s a
complete absence of takeout lines and bustle. These are places to collect
and mine one’s thoughts, either in company or alone.
Demel is the most famous of the Viennese coffeehouses, and for that
reason now not my favorite, because it does actually occasion waits for the
upstairs-seating part, and you need to book in advance to dodge them. And
it’s not even independently owned any more, having been taken over by
DO & Co restaurants and catering. And next to our table there were two
gormless tourists in baseball caps staring at their phones. It didn’t have the
quiet, understated, almost library-like ‘nurturer of the mind’ atmosphere
that I expect from a Viennese coffeehouse. But the miniature Demel
Sachertorte with whipped cream, with a cup of velvety Demel hot
chocolate, was unforgettably good. Demel is allowed to call its Sachertorte
‘Sachertorte’ because Eduard Sacher actually invented the cake while
working not at the Sacher Hotel but at Demel. After years of legal disputes
about this, all is settled, and the Demel version has the thin layer of apricot
jam just under the top layer of unctuously shining chocolate icing, while
the Sacher one has the apricot jam in the middle.

If you choose the moment just right, the spot-hitting qualities

of Kaffeehäuser really can dazzle. Peckish, elated and a bit chilly at 9:53
p.m., after a long day of sightseeing ending with a concert of Beethoven
violin sonatas at the Musikverein, we crossed the Ringstrasse, and there
was the Café Schwarzenberg to welcome us in. Window bay, radiator,
Spritzers, discussion of concert, professional waiters in black tie, generous
but undaunting menu. And for me the most warming,
flavorsome Gulaschsuppe imaginable, with a Viennese Semmel (bread
roll) and butter (which I had to ask the waiter for, and which he shimmered
off to fetch like a Viennese Jeeves). You can’t tear yourself away from
such a situation of warmth, comfort and refuge abroad, so we lingered for
coffee with cherry brandy, whipped cream and pistachio brittle: the
‘Mozart Coffee’, as it’s called on the menu.
The whipped cream on top of hot drinks thing is odd, really, because it
automatically makes the hot drink less hot. In one of the Sacher Hotel’s
own cafés (their new, dashing art nouveau ‘Salon Sacher’ to the left of the
hotel entrance), I had the famous Viennese Melange mit Schlagobers —
cappuccino with whipped cream on top. You have to go at this with a
spoon, digging in past the cream, which causes instant spillage, and then
you have to try a spoonful of the Sacher’s famous whipped cream on its
own — outrageously good and light — and then you try sipping and get a
whipped-cream mustache, so then you give the whole thing a stir, which
lowers the temperature of the whole thing to lukewarm and causes a mass
inundation on the saucer. But it’s all a huge pleasure.
The word ‘latte’ has still, thankfully, not entered the vocabulary of these
hallowed places. Instead, we have poetic Viennese names for forms of
coffee, such as the Einspänner, which means a one-horse carriage, an early
form of taxi. This consists of two shots of espresso topped with a very
deep layer of whipped cream, the cream keeping the black coffee just
warm, like a white duvet. This is why it has that name: the waiting one-
horse carriage driver liked it because he could keep his hands warm by
cupping them around the bottom half.
Is there still a slightly male feeling about these places? The Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra was famously (notoriously) the very last to admit
females into its ranks, with a violist in 2003. So Vienna is slightly behind
the curve when it comes to feminism. Looking at the people reading their
newspapers in coffeehouses this year, I did count more solitary men than
solitary women, though this is changing.
You still get the sense that Freud, Mahler or Zweig might walk in at any
moment, unaccompanied by any woman, and hang his hat on the hatstand
while deep in thought. Freud favored the Café Landtmann on the
Ringstrasse, which is still as splendid as ever. The young Zweig, also a
Landtmann regular, prided himself on never getting any fresh air, even
during the summer months. He and his friends spent hours of each day in
the Landtmann, poring over the theater and concert reviews in the Neue
Freie Presse and dreaming of getting their own reviews published in that
very paper. Long may this intellectual coffeehouse atmosphere continue,
unstifled by the phone-scrolling crowd.
This article is in The Spectator’s May 2020 US edition. Subscribe here to
get yours.
https://spectator.us/civilized-caffeination-viennese-coffeehouse-kaffeehauser/?