Café Sperl
Why is it significant?
Walk into Café Sperl and let your eyes adjust: tall windows, crystal chandeliers, dark wooden booths, and at the back the soft green of billiard tables under low lamps. This coffee house opened in 1880, and much of what you see has survived since the nineteenth century.
Key Facts
| Place | Café Sperl |
|---|---|
| Address | Gumpendorfer Straße 11, 1060 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.19980, 16.36120 |
| Part of Walk | Melange, Torte and Schnitzel: Vienna's Coffee Houses and the Naschmarkt |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk into Café Sperl and let your eyes adjust: tall windows, crystal chandeliers, dark wooden booths, and at the back the soft green of billiard tables under low lamps. This coffee house opened in 1880, and much of what you see has survived since the nineteenth century.
Unlike so many cafés that were gutted, modernised and later rebuilt, the Sperl simply carried on. That makes it one of the best places in Vienna to understand what a Ringstrasse-era café felt like. Billiards was part of the deal. Gentlemen came to play, to bet a little, to read and to argue, and a café without a billiard table looked unfinished.
Film fans may recognise the room. In Before Sunrise, in 1995, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy sit in Café Sperl and play a game of imaginary phone calls, each pretending to ring a friend and confess what they feel about the other. It is one of the gentlest scenes in modern cinema, and it happens at an ordinary table like the one beside you. Watch the regulars too: an elderly gentleman doing the crossword in ink, a student nursing one coffee through four hours of reading.
The neighbourhood helped. The Theater an der Wien, where operettas premiered, is close by, and composers, actors and officers on their way to the theatres sat here before and after the curtain. Operetta composer Franz Lehár is often named among them. And the Viennese have a word for the special melancholy you feel at such a table on a rainy afternoon, the kind of mood where you order a second coffee only so you do not have to leave.
Do try a slice of cake at the counter, by the way. Nobody judges you for having had Sachertorte half an hour ago. Then step outside, cross over towards the Linke Wienzeile, and follow the smell of spices, bread and pickles. The great market of Vienna is right below you.