
Café Hawelka
Dim, smoke-worn literary coffeehouse famed for wood-stove-baked Buchteln served nightly since the postwar era.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Cafe Hawelka in Vienna follows Leopold and Josefine Hawelka, who took over the shabby corner cafe in 1939 only to have the war shut it before they had really opened, and who returned in 1945 to cook Buchteln on a wood stove with no gas in the city. It traces how that nightly ritual pulled in Vienna's writers, especially after a rival literary cafe closed in 1961, and later artists like Andy Warhol. Come by around nine, when the last Buchteln come out of the oven.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Palais Ferstel
Venetian-Florentine palace built as a bank, now home to a storied literary coffeehouse.
Café Central
Grand nineteenth-century coffeehouse under vaulted marble arches, once the haunt of writers, chess players and revolutionaries in exile.
Café Landtmann
Grand Ringstrasse coffeehouse of marble tables and bentwood chairs, favored haunt of Sigmund Freud.
Café Sacher
Historic Viennese coffeehouse serving the original chocolate sponge torte at the center of a decades-long court battle.
Café Sperl
Art Nouveau coffeehouse with billiard tables, marble surfaces and crystal chandeliers, unchanged for over a century.
Café Prückel
Grand nineteen-oh-three coffee house reshaped into a nineteen-fifties modernist landmark with custom Lobmeyr chandeliers.