Zum Schwarzen Kameel
Why is it significant?
Find the narrow shopfront on the Bognergasse with a black camel in its name, and peer through the window at rows of tiny open sandwiches, each one topped like a small edible painting. This is Zum Schwarzen Kameel, the Black Camel, and its story begins in 1618.
Key Facts
| Place | Zum Schwarzen Kameel |
|---|---|
| Address | Bognergasse 5, 1010 Wien, Austria |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.21000, 16.36830 |
| Part of Walk | Melange, Torte and Schnitzel: Vienna's Coffee Houses and the Naschmarkt |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the narrow shopfront on the Bognergasse with a black camel in its name, and peer through the window at rows of tiny open sandwiches, each one topped like a small edible painting. This is Zum Schwarzen Kameel, the Black Camel, and its story begins in 1618.
Why a camel, in the middle of Central Europe? Because the founder was a merchant called Johann Baptist Cameel, and he dealt in spices and colonial goods, the luxuries that travelled to Vienna by caravan and by ship. His surname and his trade fitted together so neatly that the sign almost designed itself. Pepper, cloves, sugar, coffee... this was the kind of shop that brought the wider world into Habsburg kitchens.
Four centuries later, it is still a delicatessen, and still crowded at lunchtime with lawyers, bankers and old ladies in fur hats, all standing shoulder to shoulder over a Brötchen and a small glass of white wine. Behind the shop, a dining room from around 1900 keeps its dark wood and its Art Nouveau curves. Local tradition likes to count Beethoven among the customers in earlier days, though that belongs on the list of things Vienna says about almost every old address.
The Viennese have a particular weakness for eating standing up, quickly, elegantly, and with a glass in hand. It is a midday ritual called a Gabelfrühstück, a fork breakfast, eaten somewhere between real breakfast and real lunch. And a few steps away, at the corner of the Graben, stands the flagship of Julius Meinl, a firm founded in 1862 that became famous for selling coffee already roasted, so Viennese housewives no longer had to burn the beans in their own pans.
Spices, coffee, sugar: you now have every ingredient for the next stop. Walk down to the Kohlmarkt, the old coal market, and look for a shop window full of sugar sculptures. You have reached the court of the confectioners.