Café Central

This guide to Cafe Central in Vienna centers on 1913, when a shabby Russian journalist known to the waiters as Herr Bronstein sat arguing politics and playing chess at a marble table, dismissed as a joke by Austria-Hungary's own foreign minister. It moves through the cafe's other regulars under the vaulted arches, from the writer Peter Altenberg, who listed the address as his own, to Sigmund Freud, Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus at their usual tables. Order a coffee near the entrance and look for Altenberg's bronze likeness, still hunched over his own little table.