Café Tomaselli

This guide to Cafe Tomaselli in Salzburg centers on a marble table where, in the summer of 1920, the playwright Hermann Bahr, the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the director Max Reinhardt sat turning over an idea nobody wrote down at the time. It traces the cafe's own two centuries before that meeting, from a Frenchman named Johann Fontaine winning the right to sell chocolate and coffee here in 1700, through Anton Staiger turning it into the city's most fashionable room, to a teenage Mozart said to have dropped in for a cup of almond milk. Sit at any table and look at the same dark wood paneling and marble tops those three men would have known.