Café Hawelka
Why is it significant?
Open the door of the little café on the Dorotheergasse, and you step into brown: brown walls, brown wood, brown posters, a light like old varnish. Nobody has tried very hard to modernise Café Hawelka, and that is exactly why people love it. Leopold and Josefine Hawelka took over the place in 1939.
Key Facts
| Place | Café Hawelka |
|---|---|
| Address | Dorotheergasse 6, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.20800, 16.36980 |
| Part of Walk | Melange, Torte and Schnitzel: Vienna's Coffee Houses and the Naschmarkt |
| Generated | Generated |
Open the door of the little café on the Dorotheergasse, and you step into brown: brown walls, brown wood, brown posters, a light like old varnish. Nobody has tried very hard to modernise Café Hawelka, and that is exactly why people love it.
Leopold and Josefine Hawelka took over the place in 1939. Within months Leopold was called up to the army, and the café had to close. When they reopened after 1945, Vienna was hungry, cold and divided into four occupation zones, and this small room became a refuge for writers and painters who had nothing but time and ideas.
Over the following decades the regulars read like a catalogue of postwar Austrian art: Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Ernst Fuchs and the poet H. C. Artmann among them. Painters who could not pay sometimes left pictures instead, and some of those works still hang on the walls. In the 1970s the singer Georg Danzer even made the Hawelka the setting of a hit song about a naked man wandering in among the coffee drinkers.
But the real legend was Josefine's Buchteln, soft yeast buns filled with plum jam. She baked them herself late in the evening, and they came out of the oven hot when the night crowd arrived. Regulars say the trick was to come at the right hour, because once the tray was empty, there was no second batch. Herr Leopold, meanwhile, would walk the room and find you a seat by squeezing strangers together, whether they liked it or not. Josefine died in 2005. Leopold died in 2011, at the age of one hundred.
Notice that nobody rushes you. A Viennese waiter will bring water, and more water, and simply leave you alone. The bill only comes when you ask. Now step out, head towards Stephansplatz, pass the great cathedral on your left, and turn into the Wollzeile, where Vienna's most famous piece of breaded meat is waiting.