Last week I read a book called Three Thousand Coffees in Vienna, by a lady named Colleen DiFranco with whom, as I discovered, I have very little in common. The author is an American who lived in Vienna for several years (she may live here still; I haven't investigated) and the book bills itself as a picture of ex-pat life, largely American and English, in the city.
My own feelings about living as an Ausländer tend to yo-yo wildly depending on my state of mind, the weather, and which newspaper I've read on a given day. Sometimes I still wander breathlessly around the old city centre, marveling at the architecture and the numerous historical plaques proclaiming that "Mozart gave his first public concert in this house, at the age of six" or that "Freud wrote the first draft of "The Interpretation of Dreams" in this café". Other days I see things like this (or the German-language equivalents thereof, of which there are many) and have to psyche myself up to order a coffee, nervous that my accent will offend some xenophobic jerk of a potential waiter.
There are a bevy of differences between me and the characters in DiFranco's book, perhaps the most significant of which being that, while I moved here alone and of my own accord, most of the (exclusively female) characters populating her short stories are tag-along wives. Their husbands work for the embassies, or the UN, or one of the many internationally-acronym-ed organizations that have their headquarters in Austria. They, for the most part, didn't want to leave home and are counting the days until they go back again. They make no effort to learn German and then insist that "you don't [can't] make friends with Austrian women". Some of them worked as lawyers or doctors in their home countries but are, in Vienna, either retired or simply happy not to work. They are mostly middle-aged and mostly wealthy. They go to a Polish town for the weekend on a pottery-themed shopping spree and end up buying so much that they can barely haul it all back to Vienna on their rented bus.
Basically, it was a book that disappointed me by having much less to do with my life than I was hoping it would. The theme that rang truest for me, namely the bittersweetness of making good friends who will eventually and inevitably leave the city and move very far away, was overshadowed by too many paragraphs about shopping and "jokes" about not understanding the local language.
However, as little as I got out of the book in general, it did give me an idea. The characters in the first story meet every week at a local coffee house to eat, drink, and gossip (like the Sex and the City brunches, if you took out the sex talk and replaced it with more shoes and some Polish pottery). I should explain here that a Viennese Kaffehaus is quite a specific institution, and should not be confused with a Parisian Café, an Amsterdam Coffee Shop, a Starbucks, or the delightfully eccentric, organic-soy-latté-with-gluten-free-carob-cookie-dispensing independent locales which exist on every second street corner in Victoria (Spiral Café ftw!), though these all have their charms. I've been fascinated by the Kaffehäuser since my second day in Vienna, when I stumbled my way through ordering and paying for a tiny coffee from a stern, penguin-suited waiter, to whom I spoke the approximately three words of German that I had learned from "Teach Yourself German Grammar", purchased two weeks earlier from BMV on Bloor St.
A Viennese Coffee House is generally smoky (though this has changed somewhat since the introduction of partial smoking bans last year), usually fairly small, and often staffed by brusque waiters (never waitresses) wearing suits. A coffee costs anything from 1.50 to 8 Euros, depending on where you are and whether you want a fancy one with whipped cream and booze in it. There are normally booths along both sides of the room with upholstered seating. Between these two rows are small tables, which nominally seat 2-4 people but are easily challenged in this respect by the fact that even the tiniest coffee arrives borne on a large silver tray. The respective sizes of the trays and the tables are such that two trays will usually cover the surface of an entire table, leaving little to no room for food, elbows, newspapers, etc. But they do look lovely. And the grumpy waiters always bring you a tiny glass of water with a spoon balanced delicately on top of it. This also fits easily onto the tray, lending the whole exercise a modicum of purpose.
There are well over a hundred of these places in Vienna, and I have been to many of them. Once you receive your coffee (or other beverage of choice) you're generally left alone to read, study, sketch, or people watch until you flag down one of the cranks in suits and ask for the bill. One thing they don't get upset about is customers staying for hours after purchasing a single espresso.
The ladies in the book loved their Kaffeehaus, and I love many of the ones I've visited. Some, however, are more expensive than others. Some are smokier, and some have more eccentric customers to observe and ponder the life stories of. Some have great coffee, and some have merely acceptable coffee.
I've been looking for ways to get myself writing more frequently, and this seems to me to be as good a way as any. This will be, I fervently hope, the first in a series of posts examining the Wiener Kaffehäuser I Have Known and Possibly Loved.
Subject: Café Korb (literally "Café Basket"), Tuchlauben 10, 1010 Wien
Visit: Sunday afternoon, 20.03.11. Seated at tiny middle table, as the comfortable-looking and generously-sized booths were full.
Order: For me, a jasmine tea and a plate of potato-cheese puffs with salad. Tasted like cheesy tater tots, in the best possible way. Later an apple strudel, served warm and blissfully without raisins. My companion had a peppermint tea and potato and sausage goulash, followed by a dessert that I don't think I can translate into English. Sort of like a fluffy baked bun filled with cranberries, floating in a sea of creamy vanilla sauce. (We had been walking around for a few hours and were really hungry.)
Price of a Melange (standard coffee order with steamed milk and foam, basically a Viennese Cappuccino): 3.50 EUR
Wait staff: Male and impeccably-suited. One surprisingly friendly waiter (happily, serving our table) and one furious-looking one who brushed my arm with the tails of his coat every time he walked past, making me jump more than once.
Atmosphere: Standard Kaffeehaus. Lots of brown upholstery and wooden chairs. Light fixtures that would have been at home as chandeliers in my grandparents' dining room. Quite smoky, though I discovered a mysterious, large, and completely empty non-smoking room in the basement, during a search for the washroom. Either this room was closed at the time, or it's just so well hidden that no customers had found it yet. Pleasant view through large windows onto the square outside.
People-Watching: On this day, fabulous. Patrons included a heavyset, 50ish woman with eyebrows plucked into huge, perfect half-circles. She sat alone in a side booth and read newspapers with great purpose, throwing each one down on to the bench opposite as she finished. Seemingly a non-smoker, she glared insistently at another, similarly aged woman who was smoking a cigar at an adjacent table. Eventually the first woman stood up, wended her way slowly to a side door and propped it open, before lumbering back to her booth. The second woman responded by springing up herself and slamming the door shut again, before gesturing agitatedly toward the first woman and scolding her with some angry-sounding words that I unfortunately didn't catch. There was also a lady who informed the friendly waiter, as she was paying, that she didn't care for the other waiter at all. It appeared that they'd had a "conflict" several days earlier, but since then he'd been friendlier. She remained unimpressed.
The title of Most Impressive Korb Patron of 20.02.11, however, is reserved for an Englishman who was sitting directly behind me. Actually, I'm not entirely convinced that he was an Englishman, since his accent was so ridiculous that I can only assume it was fake. It was as if...I'm not sure I can come up with an appropriate cultural reference for this level of silliness. I hear him intone the phrase "oh, I say!" exactly as it would have rendered in a terrible American movie. It would not have surprised me to learn that his name was Basil Reginald Wellington and that he was employed as a Professor of Dedicated Froppery in Shropshire upon Figgiwig.
Miscellaneous: Washrooms are labelled with abstract symbols rather than with words or any sort of standard male and female signs. I was saved from making a difficult decision when two women came out of the ladies just as I came down the stairs, but eventually decided that the symbol on the mens' door looked phallic enough that I would have chosen correctly if left to my own devices.
Verdict: Good food, if slightly overpriced. I unfortunately never tried the coffee. Far too smoky for my liking, though I'm intrigued by the mysterious basement, which, between the abandoned non-smoking room (including modern, arty decor and a small stage) and white, curvy, abstract bathrooms, seems to belong to a different establishment altogether. Top-notch eccentrics as clientele. I'd visit again when I'm less hungry, and ask about the basement. Rating: Six famous, dead Viennese intellectuals out of ten.
Right, that's one down. I promise pictures next time.
