
Demel Vienna cafe
Rococo pastry salon and former imperial court confectioner known for its ornate cakes and gilded back rooms.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Café Sacher
Historic Viennese coffeehouse serving the original chocolate sponge torte at the center of a decades-long court battle.
Kohlmarkt
Pedestrian luxury shopping street of imperial court suppliers and grand old confectioners.
Café Prückel
Grand nineteen-oh-three coffee house reshaped into a nineteen-fifties modernist landmark with custom Lobmeyr chandeliers.
Café Central
Grand nineteenth-century coffeehouse under vaulted marble arches, once the haunt of writers, chess players and revolutionaries in exile.
Palais Ferstel
Venetian-Florentine palace built as a bank, now home to a storied literary coffeehouse.
Café Sperl
Art Nouveau coffeehouse with billiard tables, marble surfaces and crystal chandeliers, unchanged for over a century.