Viennese coffee house culture

Typical for Viennese coffee houses are marble tabletops, Thonet chairs, newspaper tables and interior design details in the style of historicism.

"[3] Zweig in fact attributed a good measure of Vienna's cosmopolitan air to the rich daily diet of current and international information offered in the coffee houses.

[4][5] Legend has it that soldiers of the Polish-Habsburg army, while liberating Vienna from the second Turkish siege in 1683, found a number of sacks with strange beans that they initially thought were camel feed and wanted to burn.

The Polish king Jan III Sobieski granted the sacks to one of his officers named Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, who, according to Catholic priest Gottfried Uhlich in 1783 in his History of the second Turkish Siege, was assumed to have started the first coffee house, the Hof zur Blauen Flasche.

[6] Another account is that Kulczycki, having spent two years in Ottoman captivity, knew perfectly well what coffee really was and tricked his superiors into granting him the beans that were considered worthless.

The heyday of the coffee house was the turn of the nineteenth century when writers like Peter Altenberg, Alfred Polgar, Egon Friedell, Karl Kraus, Hermann Broch and Friedrich Torberg made them their preferred place of work and pleasure.

Many famous artists, scientists, and politicians of the period such as Arthur Schnitzler, Stefan Zweig, Egon Schiele, Gustav Klimt, Adolf Loos, Theodor Herzl, and Alfred Adler.

Some relatively modern Viennese coffee houses have emerged in North America, such as Julius Meinl Chicago and Kaffeehaus de Châtillon in the greater Seattle area and Cafe Sabarsky in Manhattan.