Vienna's historic coffeehouses, the Kaffeehaus institutions

In Vienna a melange buys a chair for as long as you want it, plus a newspaper off the rack and a glass of water nobody charges for. The rooms gathered here have the documented history to go with that ritual: an Adolf Loos interior from 1899, the corner where seven painters plotted the Secession in 1897, a Buchteln recipe unchanged since 1939, a Sachertorte fought over in court. Ringstrasse palaces and back-district rooms with a wood stove are both in, because both are the same institution.

Places in this collection

  • Café Tirolerhof — Opened in 1918, in the last weeks of the First World War, and the interior has been restored to its 1920s Art Deco state using archival pho…
  • Café Kafka — Café Fuchs held this address from 1908 and drew stage actors; the renaming to Kafka came in 2001, and the timbers and the reputation carrie…
  • Kaffee Alt Wien — Established on 14 October 1922, and taken over in 1936 by Leopold Hawelka and his wife Josefine on the day after their wedding; they left i…
  • Kleines Cafe — The youngest room on this list by half a century, opened in 1970 with an interior by the architect Hermann Czech, whose space-saving soluti…
  • Café Gerstner — The Gerstner name goes back to a pastry shop opened in central Vienna in the 1840s, and the confectionery side has never stopped being the…
  • Café Ritter — A literary coffeehouse with 19th-century roots just off Mariahilfer Strasse, notable for its inter-war interior and neo-rococo ceilings. Pe…
  • Café Rüdigerhof — Jugendstil fittings in the fifth district, late hours, and a younger and more alternative crowd than the formal cafés inside the Ring. It f…
  • Café Anzengruber — Opens at four in the afternoon, Tuesday to Saturday, which puts it outside coffeehouse hours and squarely in the evening. A counter-style r…
  • Café Bräunerhof — Thomas Bernhard wrote at the same table here for decades, and the international newspaper selection that kept him is still vast. One of the…
  • Café Schwarzenberg — Opened 1861, the oldest survivor of the original 27 Ringstrasse cafés, with wood panelling, red leather banquettes and marble tables, and l…
  • Café Korb — Its 1904 opening party was attended by Emperor Franz Joseph I; rebuilt in the 1950s, it kept the booths and retro fittings from that decade…
  • Café Goldegg — Original 1910 Jugendstil fittings, a quiet room and no terrace, five minutes from the Upper Belvedere and almost entirely free of visitors.…
  • Café Eiles — Opens at seven on weekdays and runs to midnight, which makes it a breakfast café and a late newspaper café in the same day. Modernised and…
  • Café Hummel — Established 1935 on the Josefstädter Strasse and run as what the house itself calls a second living room: breakfast through to dinner, a pr…
  • Café Jelinek — Tucked just off Mariahilfer Strasse, heated by a wrought-iron wood burner, with piles of home-made cake and no wifi to distract anyone from…
  • Café Demel — Imperial and royal court confectioner since 1786, on the Kohlmarkt, with 19th-century interiors and a window display that functions as stre…
  • Café Sacher — The coffeehouse of the Hotel Sacher, opposite the State Opera, trading since 1876 on the Sachertorte that Franz Sacher devised in 1832 at t…
  • Café Prückel — First opened in 1903, with a theatre still in the basement, and furnished in the 1950s style it kept: original fittings from that period ra…
  • Café Diglas — The oldest house of the Diglas group, a few steps from Stephansplatz on the Wollzeile, with a cake counter that outperforms its reputation…
  • Café Frauenhuber — A café-restaurant since 1824, in a building where Mozart made his last public appearance in March 1791 and Beethoven played in November 178…
  • Café Museum — Adolf Loos designed the room in 1899 and the public nicknamed it Café Nihilismus for its stripped-back plainness. Loos drank here himself,…
  • Café Landtmann — Opened 1873 on the Ringstrasse beside the Burgtheater, and heritage-protected as a monument. Freud came regularly and recruited patients he…
  • Café Hawelka — Opened in 1939, came through the war intact while the streets around it did not, and has been left largely unaltered since: low ceilings, d…
  • Café Sperl — Founded 1880 and listed on the Austrian register of historic places, with its Belle Époque furnishings largely as they were: parquet, Thone…
  • Café Central — Open since 1876 on the ground floor of Palais Ferstel, with Gothic vaulting, a Venetian-style inner courtyard and a papier-mâché Peter Alte…

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