The Coffee Houses of Vienna: A 350-Year Love Affair

The story most Viennese will tell you is this: in 1683, after the second Ottoman siege of Vienna, the retreating Turkish army left behind sacks of mysterious dark beans. A Polish-born soldier named Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki recognized them — he had spent time in Constantinople — and was awarded a building on Domgasse, where in 1685 he opened the city's first coffee house.

Like many founding myths, this one is largely apocryphal. The first documented Vienna coffee house was actually opened a year earlier by an Armenian named Johannes Diodato, who had a license from the Habsburg Emperor to serve "Turkish drinks." But the Kulczycki version is the one Vienna prefers, partly because it's more romantic and partly because it locates the city's most beloved institution at a moment of military triumph.

What's not in dispute is that within a few decades of those first cafés, Vienna had developed something genuinely new — a kind of public living room that wasn't quite a tavern, wasn't quite a restaurant, and wasn't quite a club. By the late nineteenth century the coffee house had become the city's defining social institution. By the twentieth century it had produced more important conversations, manuscripts, manifestos, and arguments than perhaps any other room type in European history.

In 2011, UNESCO added the Viennese coffee house to its list of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The citation called it "a place where time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is found on the bill." That's the right phrase. Coffee is the thing you order. The coffee house is the thing you're paying for.

What makes a coffee house a coffee house

A real Viennese Kaffeehaus is recognizable on sight. Marble-topped Thonet tables. Bentwood chairs. Newspapers held in wooden newspaper-holders, free for patrons to read. Long banquettes along one wall. A red velvet or maroon color palette. Crystal chandeliers, often slightly tarnished. A small selection of pastries in a glass case. A waiter in a black tuxedo and white apron — a Herr Ober — who treats you with formal politeness verging on indifference, which is the Viennese signal that you are welcome to stay for as long as you like and order as little as you like.

The unwritten rules of the coffee house are more important than any written ones:

• You can stay all afternoon for the price of a single coffee. Nobody will rush you, ever. Many of the great works of Viennese literature were drafted across years of single-coffee afternoons.
• The coffee comes with a glass of water on a small silver tray. The water is refilled, unasked, throughout your visit. This is not a courtesy; it's a constitutional right.
• You order the coffee by name, not by description. A Melange is not a cappuccino. A Verlängerter is not an Americano. A Brauner is not a macchiato. Each has its own ritual, its own glass, its own ratio.
• The newspapers are part of the deal. A good house keeps a dozen domestic and international papers in those wooden holders, refreshed daily. Reading them slowly, with your coffee, was the original information feed.
• Conversation is welcome but never loud. The acoustics of marble, wood, and high ceilings encourage a particular kind of murmured discussion that has produced an unreasonable share of European cultural history.

The room that built modernity

It is not an exaggeration to say that the Viennese coffee house was one of the principal incubators of European modernism. The roster of writers, artists, philosophers, and scientists who did much of their work in Vienna's cafés between roughly 1890 and 1938 is unreasonable:

• Sigmund Freud and his circle held court at Café Landtmann.
• Stefan Zweig wrote there. So did Joseph Roth, who is sometimes claimed by Café Museum and sometimes by Café Herrenhof.
• The Wittgenstein family argued at the Griensteidl, which the writer Karl Kraus famously eulogized when it closed in 1897.
• Adolf Loos designed the interior of the Café Museum and held court in it.
• Trotsky and Hitler — at different cafés, fortunately — both spent long Vienna years drinking coffee and reading newspapers.
• Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession argued through afternoons at Café Central.
• Egon Schiele drew at the Café Museum.
• Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arthur Schnitzler, and the entire Jung-Wien literary group essentially lived at the Griensteidl.

The reason this was possible was structural. The cafés provided heated, lit, well-stocked rooms with newspapers and writing surfaces, in a city where most apartments were cold and small. They were the city's de facto co-working space, but with much better drinks. Many regulars received their mail at their café.

The great houses still worth visiting

If you have a few days in Vienna and want to do this properly, there are perhaps a dozen surviving coffee houses that have kept the tradition essentially intact. A short list:

• Café Central (Herrengasse 14) — Gothic vaulted ceilings, marble columns, a famously haughty Herr Ober. Touristy now, but still magnificent. Trotsky's old hangout.
• Café Hawelka (Dorotheergasse 6) — small, dim, tobacco-stained, gloriously unrenovated. The closest thing to the literary cafés of the 1920s that still exists.
• Café Sperl (Gumpendorfer Straße 11) — opened 1880, almost unchanged. The classic afternoon café, with a quiet billiards room in the back.
• Café Landtmann (Universitätsring 4) — grand and theatrical, opposite the Burgtheater. Freud's old café. Best for an evening Einspänner before a play.
• Café Bräunerhof (Stallburggasse 2) — the favorite of writer Thomas Bernhard, who described it with characteristic brutality in his novels. Live piano on weekend afternoons.
• Café Prückel (Stubenring 24) — a 1955 redesign by Oswald Haerdtl in the postwar modernist mode, which sounds wrong and is actually wonderful. Plays Tuesday-evening jazz.
• Café Museum (Operngasse 7) — Loos's original interior was destroyed in a 1930s renovation but the café persists. A favorite of art students from the Akademie next door.

Each has its own character. The thing they share is a refusal to be hurried. Sit. Order a coffee. Ask the waiter what's good in the pastry case today. Pull a newspaper from the rack. Stay for two hours. Watch the regulars arrive at the same tables they've occupied for forty years.

What the coffee house is for

In a city that, in the last century, lost an empire, survived two world wars, hemorrhaged its Jewish intellectual class to exile and murder, was occupied for a decade, and was then rebuilt and reinvented, the coffee house has been one of the few institutions that bridges all of it. The waiter at Café Sperl today is the inheritor of a tradition that includes Mozart's contemporaries and Freud's analysands and Schiele's models and the Cold War spies of the Hotel Sacher.

That's the thing you're sitting inside when you order a Melange and unfold a newspaper in a Viennese café. It's not nostalgia, exactly. It's continuity, in a city that has had to fight harder than most to keep any.

The coffee, by the way, is also very good.