Grand Cafés :
Vienna, Austria
Vienna’s unique “Grand Café” Kaffeeklatches, perfect for Oktoberfest.
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seat. His pointy leather shoes were ugly, scuffed. While my Rockport walking shoes were the envy of every foot fetishist on the continent, which I secretly suspected was what Siggy was: a feet man.
A waiter resembling a young Gustav Klimt, in a starched white apron, took our orders on a notepad, as I asked, “What’s the name of this café?”
“Wass?”
“Der nomen, dis Kaffe?”
“Ah-so, Kaffe Sperl. . .”
Somehow Siggy and I had landed at one of Vienna’s most famous and atmospheric cafes, the Café Sperl (11 Gumpendorferstrasse), built in 1880 with a Waspy yellow-and-black exterior facade—all smoke and mirrors, on a difficult to pronounce thoroughfare. This Belle Epoch building topped even the tacky Grand Prospect Hall in Brooklyn. I felt like a character from Graham Greene’s “The Third Man” (1949)--also a classic film with Joseph Cotton and Orson Welles, which made the iconic “Big Wheel” (built by British architect Walter Basset in the 1880s) justly famous. We both ordered cheesecake and café du lait, recommended in my guidebook.
But unfortunately, I had to give the “Sperl” an unhurried hurl and a vigorous Roman thumb’s down: poisoned!
“Now we go very important Platz!” Siggy enthused, laughing at my coughed-up “Type II diabetes”- endangering sweet yuck. “Yes, we go to only the best next!”
Café Demel - Vienna - Tourist Hot Spot
Of course this next-best coffee stop turned out to be the tourist-mobbed “Café Demel” (14 Kohlmarkt: 00 431-5351 7170), the only café, really a confectionary, that might require a phoned-in reservation in advance. Even so, we settled down after a long wait for some “Mohr Im Hemd” (chocolate soufflé pudding), “Lakronene” (macaroons), and ginger hot chocolate.
I didn’t mind paying for everything up to so far, but the bill was too steep to cover on my own. I politely asked for a donation and Siggy handed me a crushed up ball of euros.
“Nein Deutschmarks!” Siggy bruited.
Switching to white “Gerwertzentraminer” (dry white wine), I realized that it was kind of fun to be lost. . . . In fact, the Kaffeehaus poet Peter Altenburg often gave up his personal address as “Vienna I. Café [blank],” as an ode to way opulent monumentalism and romantic historicism.
Diglas Café - Vienna - Pit Stop Worthy
After ducking into The Diglas Café (10 Wollzeilestrasse), with, believe it or not, see-through toilets, for a touristic bathroom break, I sanitized my hands before ordering their signature vanilla custard and a cuppa. Not bad, but not good enough for my must-see list.
Café Muzeum - Vienna - High Octane Fuel
Ditto, the “Adolf Loos”-designed Café Muzeum (1899), Egon Schiele’s favorite pit stop for high-octane fuel. Although we just barely stepped into its shadows, Siggy assured me that for the Preis (all nouns in German are capitalized) of a single espresso you could stay here for hours undisturbed, writing postcards.
Then as a joke (I wasn’t laughing), Siggy pointed out one of the city’s local Starbucks (49 Kartnerstrasse), with free Wifi. At least, this chain is preferable to the Indian-owned “Coffee Day,” which lingered around the city off-puttingly like butt-stinky curry or stale cigar smoke.
Somewhere around the impressively forbidding Gothic Schoenbrun Palace (architect: Fisher von Ehrlich), I lost Siggy in the crowd of en vogue boulevardiers and fashionistas with ponytails while I continued my architectural waltz past monuments such as are covered in my Berlitz Guide. And at last I started waltzing back to my “Zimmer” (private room) in the Centrum, whose “comedia dell arte” common room served 5-euro coffee and “Streissekooken” for mostly impecunious backpackers and Roma (gypsy) musicians, even though it didn’t make my Top 10 List. . . .
But how about those free Hershey’s Kisses ™, rather than Austrian chocos (comparible with Swiss brands) resembling chess pieces or pert tatas?
In the end, I felt the spiritual uplift of the sine qua non musical-chairs-loving charmingly unctuous city around me, “a place where time and space is consumed,” as well as plenty of pretty polly. With the bile of the “Blue Danube” rushing by me I could tell why Wien’s café culture tradition is designated an (intangible) UNESCO World Heritage Site, much like reading a poem by Maria Rainier Rilke on the sly.
Even so, my literary walking tour (“on spec” with a “kill fee”) did not follow an either-or proposition. A tingle of dread adventure moved around in my stomach like a Stuxnet Worm stuck in cyberspace, as I eventually submitted to a monotone phonomat guide in German, sounding a lot like suppressed swearing. (I decided to skip the Art Nouveau Hohe Brucke, Parliament, and Stock Exchange.)
Café Alstadt - Vienna - Not My Cup of Joe
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