The Viennese coffee house is a veritable institution, and typical features would include Thonet chairs, little marble tables, booths, and tables strewn with newspapers, presided over by waitstaff in black livery and white shirts; the capital’s coffee houses have always been a venue to meet and converse, a place of communication and creativity, and somewhere to work and read the newspapers.
A recent study set itself the task of finding out how the Vienna coffee house’s image might be faring these days, and the results proved unambiguous: it still enjoys an outstanding reputation, and some 32,000 Vienna residents treat it as the proverbial “alternative living room”, making daily visits. A third of the population visits a coffee house at least once a week, while a quarter go several times a month to meet friends (around 70% of survey respondents) or to relax (just about 40% of respondents).
More than half of these visitors treated themselves to some cake or tart to go with the caffeine during their visit, and the top seller on the coffee menu is the Wiener melange (equal parts Americano and frothed milk). There are also plenty of specialities with bizarre names to discover – the Einspänner, for example. The word actually means a carriage pulled by a single horse, and the coachman, perched up on the coach box, would hold his coffee in his hand, hoping the beverage would stay warm for as long as possible; to make this happen, the mocha would simply be topped off with a big dollop of whipped cream (known as Schlagobers) to insulate it, as it were. Voilà – the Einspänner was born.
Along with its speciality coffees, the Vienna coffee house also boasts a long history, with the first opening its doors at the end of the 17th century. The institution gained international renown through the World’s Fair of 1873 and, by 2011, traditional Viennese coffee house culture had been inscribed as UNESCO intangible cultural heritage: the coffee house was described as a place “in which time and space are consumed, but only the coffee is listed on the bill”, and this recent study has shown that this is still how it is perceived and appreciated. Quite why 2% of Vienna’s residents never visit a coffee house might be the ideal conundrum to puzzle over – in a coffee house.
