A Seat in Vienna: Café Tables and Quiet Thoughts

Among Vienna’s famed cafés, Café Central is arguably the most touristy. Its antiquity, its pleasing exterior and interiors, and especially its association with great intellectuals, are the draw. I was there on a good day, the queue was short—being May, tourists were not yet in town in large numbers. My first Viennese coffee I drank there, and closed my eyes in pleasure after the first sip. A Verlängerter espresso, with a vegan Vienna Machia cake. Then I looked around. I wanted to ask, but didn’t, “Where did Freud mostly sit here?” It was easy to imagine him there, though, watching us all—perhaps at a corner table—nodding slightly at a well-dressed waiter, scribbling something cryptic on a napkin, lifting his face to the vaulted ceiling, lost in elevated thought.

I attempted a Freudian attitude myself and watched the faces around. I saw only that every face was attractive, faces from everywhere—north and south, east and west.

The other Freud hangout appealed more to me: Café Landtmann, founded by Franz Landtmann in 1873. Of the eight days I was there, I went there four times, drinking Verlängerter espresso each time, and one of the two vegan cakes on offer: Gugelhupf St. Vegan (vegan marble cake) or Mango Vegan. This is a larger café, and very popular, but I never had to stand in line to get in. Also, the interior seating is mostly inward looking, so I got to watch the folks, who were more local than tourist.

There’s a third café attributed to Freud, Café Korb, which prints its bills in the name of Susanne Widl, an Austrian celebrity who is its current owner. She has retained the café in an aged state, and when I was there, there were a good number of senior citizens in dark rumpled suits, picking newspapers secured in metal clamps and laid on ancient billiards tables, and losing themselves in them. (They say the Austrian inclination is to open to the arts and culture pages first.) In all these cafés, I didn’t see debates, but there was certainly intense conversation.

I haven’t an answer to why I seek these places that famous intellectuals haunted—especially the cafés. Even Stefan Zweig, young and arriving in Paris, sought out the favourite café of his revered poet, the Belgian Verhaeren. He inquired about Verhaeren’s favourite table, and sat there, in homage.

The café has long been an enabler of intellectual life in Europe. Sartre in Paris would buy a coffee and, with that, earn the free rent of a chair for the day—somewhere to read, write, meet others, and exchange ideas. From such conversations and silences came books, art, and thought that shaped the modern mind, for good and bad.

Imagine the year 1913. Hitler (struggling artist), Stalin (writing his Marxist treatise), Trotsky (editor, Pravda), Freud (established psychoanalyst), and Tito (metalworker) were all in Vienna at the same time, taking chairs in these cafés. Imagine the energy that charged the air in them that year!

Also: If cafés ever decided to claim royalties on the work created within their walls, what sort of fortunes would be contested?

I went to the new cafes, too. In Joseph Brot on Landstraßer Hauptstraße, they had a pastry they called Bio Veganer Passionsfrucht S. This was a nice, bright, bakery café, and both the Verlängerter and the pastry were terrific. Joseph Brot was established in 2009, so Zweig or Freud haven’t been there. Still, I got a terrific Austrian feel in it. The pastry, the young staff, and the extended espresso doubled my love for Vienna that had already built up high.

And then, a change of pace—my son Yashas called me. Go to Salzburg! he urged. He wanted me to have lunch at the St. Peter’s Stiftskulinarium there. I took the train Saturday. As soon as I went in, I thanked my son mentally. I was in a wonderful place, no matter the reference—past or present. It was a very old establishment (803), but it was exciting even in its present state. It had the feel of the abbey about it, being in one, with an assured sense of continuity, and, as I soon saw, quality that came from integrity, and taste from the application of disciplined minds over centuries.

It has had to stop operating sometimes, like during the Napoleonic wars, when invading French soldiers were billeted there. But it always reopened, to continue service for over a millennium.

The waiter who showed me my table was a senior with a spring in his step. I ordered soup, gnocchi, and marinated strawberries for dessert. He was all right with my choices except for dessert. I’d have preferred a crème brûlée, he said, shrugging and turning away in a mock show of disappointment. How I enjoyed all three! 

But then, back in Vienna that evening, I ate a simple dinner at a small outlet of Veggiezz near the Burggarten—Karotte-Ingwer Suppe and Chinatown Bowl—which satisfied me as completely as the gourmet stuff I’d had at lunch. I sang silent praises to this place all the way to my hotel in the Neubau district.

In Neubau, I had dinner twice in this trip at Tian Bistro, a restaurant where each course felt like a thoughtful composition, served as part of a set meal comprising TIAN Tatar with Joseph Bread, Salsify with buckwheat and scarlet runner bean, Green asparagus with sorrel and cashew, Cauliflower with grapefruit and tarragon, a main course of Gnocchi with white asparagus and dill, and for dessert Curd with rhubarb and almond.

It was more food than my belly ever gets, but it took it all with alacrity.

The only night when I had to do without Austrian fare was on the last day, after the Mozart Concert at the Musikverein, where the only vegan fare I could get was a Brötchen Ratatouille-Aufstrich, which was incredibly tasty, but they had only one piece of the tiny thing, and no other vegan saviour. Back at the hotel at 11:00, I asked in the lounge if they had anything to eat. No. Sorry. There was something grounding about that moment. Vienna might offer Mozart and marble tables, but even here, a late-night wanderer may find himself negotiating dinner with a banana. Fruits? they asked.

I was at a pricey hotel, a sort of a boutique, nice with artsy rooms and corridors, but they didn’t have an all-day, all-night kitchen. I took a banana, and that was dinner on my last night in Vienna. The banana was big, and bland. Back home, we grow them small—and sweet. Even the finest journeys end with something plain. Perhaps that’s how memory keeps its balance.