Soon, and that won’t be long, the melange will cost 4 euros. That’s according to Heute, the “semi-official” tabloid of the Wiener Linien, the Viennese transportation lines.
That is not a welcome news for everyone who loves to have his/her coffee fix one hour after the other. I am not a caffeine addict but I enjoy the smell and taste of coffee once in a while. Especially hanging out in a coffee house where you can watch people without being dubbed as a voyeur (yes, I watch people) and sit for hours, biding your time.
It is in this regard that I’d like to share to a friend who visited me last year the tradition of my host country–the Viennese coffee culture.
Heavy with child, I agreed to be her tour guide armed with my brochures, pamphlets and books I have collected ever since 2000.
This friend, being a certified coffee lover, is a fan of Starbucks and other stylised American type of coffee shops. I told myself it is now the time to introduce her to the nitty and gritty of the real coffee culture in Europe that served and inspired the different personalities (Austrian literati, artists and bohemians and the common people) for centuries.
The writer Friedrich Torberg was one of the many products of this union of coffee and pen. His work–”Tante Jolesch”–was entirely set in a (and inspired with) Viennese coffee house. (SO forced me to read it and I am having difficulty finishing it.)
One Viennese admitted to me that being in a coffee house is like leaving the real world. “You close the doors and all the troubles you have are forgotten. You leave them behind. You read the newspaper, you play the billiards, you play chess, you talk to your friends while you drink your coffee or beer and everything has become peaceful.” I didn’t buy it. But I am pretty sure it is the illusion it creates, of being left into your own devices while slurping your cup of coffee covered in frothy milk. Some people too treat it as the place to be seen, for hipsters and trendsetters.
But since we are in Vienna, man, I thought what a way to introduce her to “these” places she only read in books and magazines.
So, okay, instead of heeding my husband’s plea not to go to the pubs and coffee houses and inhale the cigarette smoke, I decided it would be a pity if we wouldn’t be able to pay an hommage to the most famous of them all, the Bräunerhof on Stallburggasse 2 in the first district. My former teacher in Alpha Sprachinstitut brought us there on the last day of our German session in 2001 and was proud of this nifty old hangout in the inner district. The coffee house is a symbol of the Viennese lifestyle–laid-back, neutral, free.
Did I mention that my friend is a lifestlye journalist?
Oh, well….
In the end I thought I made the right decision. If you have been to Bräunerhof the facade is not really impressive. Well, I didn’t fall in love with it the first time I was there. But after a while, I have found myself adoring the comforts it brings, even though one of the crew is so slow and so stoic that once we almost felt like leaving the place without even paying our bill.

The coffee house is in the state of beautiful decay. It has become an antiquity, a museum of its own. The works of no-name and struggling artists decorating the walls even augment its rank in the hearts of every artiste. No wonder Richard Linklater wanted to capture the city’s charm when he filmed “Before Sunrise.”
And so as I bolted the locks and shut the doors behind us my friend’s face turned blank. Not amused, not even upset.
Uh-oh, that means trouble, I said to myself.
There we were in front of the wooden dark brown table, taking our seats in the velvet-lined chairs, she was looking at the whole area, the newspaper-reading patrons, the talking patrons, the coffee-drinking patrons, who didn’t mind that there was a life outside as if they were stranded in their own time and world.
We ordered our melange, ate our cakes, paid them and hastily left the premises.
She didn’t say a word until she received an SMS from a fellow writer, who also visited Vienna months before her, urging her to visit “this coffee shop with the best cakes and patries in the whole town” and that she shouldn’t “miss it” because this place “is a must for every tourist.”
And get this, my friends, the fellow writer was referring to Demel. So yeah, we ran around searching for it. I told her this is not the typical Viennese’s choice. Along with the Japanese tourists, she grabbed the Sacher torte and was relieved that she was here and saw the place.
She believed her more than she believed me. I tried my best not to lead her to tourist traps but she seached for them. In the end it was not my fault if she didn’t like Vienna and was not at all impressed with its coffee culture.