Vienna: The City That Earns a Second Visit

Vienna is a city that presents itself confidently. The Ringstrasse, the imperial palaces, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, the Opera House — these are not modest attractions, and they are placed with the deliberateness of a city that has thought carefully about what it wants to be seen as. The first visit almost inevitably follows their logic: Schönbrunn, the Belvedere, the Hofburg, the Naschmarkt. These are real and they are worth seeing. They are also, in a city this layered, the beginning of the story rather than its substance.

The Vienna that reveals itself on the second visit — or on the first visit to someone who is paying a different kind of attention — is smaller, stranger, more human, and more interesting than its imperial self-presentation suggests.

The coffeehouse as institution

The Vienna coffeehouse is a UNESCO-listed cultural heritage item — not a specific building but an institution, a way of organising time and thought that has been continuous in the city since the seventeenth century. The Viennese coffeehouse is not a café in the contemporary sense. It is a place where you may sit for as long as you wish, ordering nothing beyond the first coffee, and the waiter — the Herr Ober, white-aproned, professionally indifferent — will leave you alone with your newspapers and your thoughts until you choose otherwise. The single glass of water brought with every coffee is refilled without request. The newspapers on their wooden holders are available to all. Time is not commodified in the coffeehouse, which is why it feels so different from every other hospitality environment in the contemporary city.

The coffeehouses worth sitting in for an hour: Café Central, in the Palais Ferstel, is the most beautiful and the most visited — the vaulted ceiling, the marble columns, the Thonet chairs. Go at an off hour on a weekday. Café Hawelka, in the first district, is smaller, darker, and has been run by the same family since 1939; the Buchteln (sweet yeasted dumplings) served in the evening are made from a recipe that has not changed. Café Schwarzenberg on the Ring is the oldest surviving coffeehouse in Vienna and has retained a formality that its competitors have largely traded away. In all of them, the ceremony of ordering a Kleiner Brauner or a Melange and settling in for the morning is the point. The coffee is the excuse.

The Vienna that is not on the Ring

The seventh district — Neubau — is where the city's creative and independent retail life has concentrated, slowly and with considerable character, over the past decade. The bookshops here are the most interesting in the city: Buchhandlung Walther König, the art and theory bookseller, occupies two floors of beautifully organised discernment. Mango Books is a small English-language independent with the specific quality of a shop whose stock has been chosen by someone who actually reads. The galleries along the Kirchengasse and the Stiftgasse are showing work that the museum world has not yet caught up with.

The second district — Leopoldstadt, the former Jewish quarter — is undergoing a careful revival that makes it worth an afternoon. The Karmelitermarkt is the market that cooks in Vienna actually use: Saturday morning, proper produce, the city doing its weekend provisioning without the tourist overlay that the Naschmarkt has acquired. The prater, the vast park that contains the famous Riesenrad (giant ferris wheel), extends far enough into its own meadows and forests that the fairground at its entrance becomes irrelevant within ten minutes of walking. The Hauptallee, the four-kilometre chestnut avenue through the park, is the most undervisited great urban walk in any capital city I know.

The music question

Vienna's musical life is extraordinary and also, in its most accessible form, somewhat managed for visitors. The Philharmoniker, the Staatsoper, the concert halls of the Musikverein: these are world-class and legitimately among the best reasons to be in Vienna. They are also fully booked months in advance for the best performances. The alternative is the city's chamber music and recital culture, which operates at a level equal to any in Europe and with considerably more booking flexibility.

The Konzerthaus and the Musikverein both have chamber and recital series alongside their orchestral programming that are less dominated by tourist demand and more representative of what serious Vienna listeners actually attend. A weeknight recital at the Brahms-Saal — the smaller hall within the Musikverein, acoustically perfect, intimate — is the musical experience of Vienna at its most real: a local audience, a serious programme, a hall that has heard more music than almost any other room in the history of Western art. Booking two weeks in advance is usually sufficient. The price of a good seat is a fraction of the main hall. Go.

Stay longer than three nights. Vienna is a city that gives its best gradually. The first day is the monuments. The second is the museums. The third is the neighbourhoods. The fourth is the coffeehouse at ten in the morning with nowhere particular to be, with the newspaper and the Melange and the realisation that the city has been arranging this exact moment for you since before you arrived. That fourth day is the one worth coming for.

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