Viennese Coffee House Culture: Melange, Marble Tables and Plenty of Time

A place where you order time

In a Viennese coffee house you order a Melange and receive something that is not on the menu: time. You can sit for hours at a marble table, read the papers, write or simply watch people, and nobody pushes you towards the till. The official description puts it nicely: coffee houses are places "where time and space are consumed, but only the coffee appears on the bill". Since November 2011, Viennese coffee house culture has been listed in Austria's national inventory of UNESCO intangible cultural heritage. A cup of coffee as the ticket into a public living room, that is the whole idea. And it has worked for more than 300 years.

The legend and the truth

The most famous founding story goes like this: after the second Turkish siege of 1683, sacks full of green coffee beans were left behind outside the city walls. The scout Georg Franz Kolschitzky supposedly claimed them as his reward and opened the first coffee house, "Zur blauen Flasche". A lovely story, but invented. It only appeared about a hundred years later and is considered debunked today.

The truth is less spectacular but well documented: on 17 January 1685, the Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato was the first to receive the privilege from Emperor Leopold I to publicly serve coffee in Vienna. He served the then exotic drink in his own home in the city centre. That coffee reached Central Europe via the Ottoman Empire is true, though. How it was and still is brewed there, you can read in our piece on Turkish coffee.

The menu as a language of its own

Anyone carelessly ordering "a coffee" in Vienna is immediately exposed as a tourist. The menu is its own vocabulary, and the base of everything is the Mokka, also called Schwarzer: a small, strong black coffee.

Melange

The classic: half coffee, half warm milk, topped with milk foam. The Melange is the Viennese cousin of the cappuccino, usually a touch milder. How milk drinks differ around the world is covered in our comparison of cappuccino, flat white and latte.

Einspänner

A double Mokka in a glass with a handle, topped with plenty of Schlagobers, as whipped cream is called in Vienna. It is named after the drivers of one-horse carriages: one hand on the reins, one on the glass, and the layer of cream kept the coffee warm.

Kapuziner

A Schwarzer with a few drops of cream, just enough for the colour to resemble the robe of a Capuchin monk. The Italian cappuccino inherited its name from it.

Verlängerter and Brauner

The Verlängerter is a Mokka stretched with hot water. The small or large Brauner comes with a dash of milk or cream. Once you understand this, you read the menu like a local.

The ritual with the glass of water

In Vienna, every coffee comes with a glass of fresh water, served on a small tray, often with the spoon placed upside down on the rim. That is not decoration but a quiet invitation: feel free to stay a little longer. In traditional houses the water is refilled without you having to ask. Add the marble tables, the curved Thonet chairs, booths of dark wood and newspapers on wooden holders. Much of this has barely changed since the 19th century, and that is exactly the point.

Living room, office and postal address

Around 1900, the coffee house was the living room of Vienna's intellectuals. The poet Peter Altenberg had his mail sent to Café Central, located on Herrengasse since 1876, and simply gave the coffee house as his home address. Leon Trotsky, who lived in Vienna as an emigrant from 1907 until the First World War, played chess there almost daily; the waiters knew him as Herr Bronstein. Stefan Zweig, Robert Musil, Alfred Polgar: a good part of literary history was written at these marble tables, often over a single cup and several hours.

What you can borrow from it

You do not have to travel to Vienna to adopt the best part of this culture: giving coffee time. Drink a cup deliberately instead of on the side, stay seated instead of taking away, leave the phone alone for once. Specialty coffee is made for this, because its aromas only unfold when you pay attention to them. You will find freshly roasted beans from small Swiss roasteries on our marketplace, and if you would rather have a piece of Viennese cosiness delivered regularly, there is our subscription. The marble table you will have to source yourself.