Demel Vienna cafe

This guide to Demel in Vienna centers on Udo Proksch, the flamboyant designer who owned the pastry shop for two decades starting in the 1970s and used its gilded back rooms to host a private club for Vienna's most powerful politicians. It follows what happened when a freighter called the Lucona, insured by Proksch's company for a fortune in supposed uranium-processing equipment, sank in the Indian Ocean in January 1977 and took six of its twelve crew down with it. The silver knives on the cake trolley today are the same ones that were on the table through all of it.