May 2023
John M. 's Reviews
|
The obviously unemployable flaneur with umlaut eyes landed at my marble-topped table without a proper invite, brusquely pushing aside a Thonet wooden chair. Brandishing a copy of Der Spiegel on a wooden rolling pin in his left hand, and reeking from an unfortunate cologne resembling turning fruit or female arousal or even Cutter ™, Sigmund sighed, coughing up and swallowing a leech-like phlegm ball. “Wow!” I breathed in speedy disbelief. “Any relation to the American filmmaker Steven Spielberg?!” “Why yes!” “Siggy” fogged up his Rayban aviator sunglasses and polished the lenses on a starched white napkin, smiling like a demon out of Hieronymous Bosch. “Steven Spielberg is a distant cousin of mine. . . .”
Grand Café - Vienna’s - Most Storied Meeting Place However, inside, with its vaulted ceilings, marble pillars, wooden hat racks , bentwood chairs, and foreign periodicals on roller sticks, the Café Grand (or Grand Café) was once the haunt of such dastardly political villains as Lenin, Trotsky, and Freud. It almost seemed like at any minute an anarchist, perhaps a Serbian terrorist from “The Black Hand,” who assassinated The Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, thus sparking World War I, would come in and roll a bowling-ball shaped bomb down the elaborately laid parquet flooring. In point of fact, though, I couldn’t tell offhand if “Siggy” was just an apparent poseur dressed in a 19th-century-style frockcoat, more Fraud than Freud. I instead took him at his word, mostly wretched Englische. “Wellkommen, Bienvenu, Welcome!” Siggy sang like Joel Gray in “Cabaret.” Everything was oh-so perfect, an epiphany: even if this spectacle was one of the only non-smoking demesnes in all of Vienna. Why? Nothing goes better with a cigarette than a “machiatto”! Ah, at last the al fresco! Siggy and I left the Café Grand, much like a quick gay pickup (even though I am straight), in order to direct me on a walking tour of Vienna’s favorite sites, taking in as many Kaffeeklatches we could muster. In retrospect, I never drank more cups of coffee in my life.
Café Central - Vienna - Where It All Started Get this? Vienna was the site of Europe’s very first Kaffeehaus, opened in 1685 (name unknown) with a busybee umph and a royal assist. According to legend, when the Ottoman Turks retreated from their deadly siege of the Austro-Hungarian city in 1683, they left behind bags of coffee beans, which were promptly “brewed” by the Habsburgian army, then led by “Prussian” Polish general Jan Sobieski. Austrians poured hot water on the crushed-up beans, and presto! Thus, both kaffee (based upon Islamic loot originally derived from Ethiopia) and the croissant (based upon the sickle in Turkish flags) overtook the city, and later the entire Eurasian continent. Today, Austria has the second-highest coffee consumption per capita in the world, topped only by (curiously) Norway. With coffee being a 300-year-old tradition, a favorite of visiting vampires Moliere and Voltaire (as well as many other philosophes), Vienna proves that coffee isn’t just a right, but also a privilege. It just happens. One Holy Roman Emporer, a Habsburg, once suggested banning coffee as the “devil’s drink,” but nobody in the Holy Roman Empire (800-1806) or subsequent Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867-1918) cooperated with the decree, nor paid any attention to it. By 1900, there were over 600 kaffeehaus in the city, while now there are only a couple of hundred left. The then-closed-down Café Ritter (1867) almost declared bankruptcy recently, even though it once upon a time ruled with its “Wienerschnitzel” and “Tafelspitz” and “Guglhupf.”
Café Korb - Vienna - Edward's Best Keep Secret Not long after, assisted to our chairs in a fairly nondescript but opulent café, whose name I spaced, Siggy removed his feet from the floor and placed them on a neighboring .... |
