Give It A Whirl

Vienna is slowly embracing speciality, but it’s also retaining the traditions of its coffeehouse culture – and that adds up to a wonderful experience.

- Erin O’Connor

In their book Café Central: Viennese Culinary Culture Then And Now, writers Werner Meisinger and Rudolf Novak say that “in Vienna, the pleasures of coffee have become the hallmark of an advanced civilisation”. Ernst Naber, a member of the family that founded Naber Kaffee in 1908, said life in Vienna “revolves around coffeehouses”. Coffee is woven into the cultural fabric of the city, and no visit to Vienna is complete without a visit to one of its famed coffeehouses.

So ingrained is coffee in Vienna’s identity that since 2011 UNESCO has listed Viennese Coffee House Culture in the Austrian inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage. The city’s cafés have been fertile ground for writers, political thinkers and artists; at the beginning of the 20th century, you might find Sigmund Freud deep in an intellectual debate while sipping on a wiener melange (the Austrian take on cappuccino), or the poet Peter Altenberg tucking into a generous slice of sachertorte.

In recent years we have seen the speciality coffee movement taking root in Austria’s capital, with people increasingly gravitating towards a more innovative approach to the beverage. Yet Vienna has been slow to catch on compared to the rest of Europe – as recently as 2014, it could be considered a speciality coffee wasteland. Now, each district is seeing independent cafés and roasters appearing, all vowing to chip away at the entrenched traditions of Viennese coffee culture.