#201: World Cup City - Austria 🇦🇹
Day 35: Einen Kaffee bitte
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Wiener Kaffeehaus AT 60, Av. de Cortenbergh 60, 1000 Bruxelles
The Wiener Kaffeehaus on Avenue Kortenberg is a curio, in a city not short of oddities. It is, as the name suggests, a Viennese coffeehouse, possibly the first in Brussels since the heyday of the grand continental mirror-lined cafés of the 19th century. But it’s not housed in a historic property - partly because the city knocked most of them down in the 1960s - and it’s lacking some of the signature features you might expect to find on establishments on the Ringstrasse or the Herrengasse: no marble tables, no ornate historicist architecture, and a total absence of any bedraggled-looking journalists scraping together what coins they have for a cheap cup of coffee.
On a warm Monday lunchtime in high office season, the Kaffeehaus does not exactly exude the kind of atmosphere, as Stefan Zweig once described, “where every guest can sit for hours with this little offering, to talk, write, play cards, receive post, and above all consume an unlimited number of newspapers and journals.” That the place is reminiscent more of an airport lounge than a lived-in coffee house is explained by the fact that the café is located in an annex to the the ground-floor lobby of the House of the Austrian Economy in Brussels, a modern office building on Avenue Cortenberg and an initiative of an Austrian chamber of commerce organisation.
So instead of eavesdropping on Zweig being shaken down by his down-on-his-luck friend Joseph Roth for a few spare Schillings or Sindelaar and Hugo Meisl talking football tactics, I’m forced to listen to a couple having an animated, crackly video call in Chinese with some and their phone set to loudspeaker. They do seem a little put out to no longer have the place to themselves, as we’re joined shortly after my arrival by a large woman who sits down at a table near the entrance and orders in German a big lunchtime glass of white wine. The Chinese could eventually hang up the phone and leave, and the place is quiet again.
The decoration - black matte tables, brushed bronze fittings, and large elliptical mirrors - may not scream Vienna, but the menu is a veritable what’s-what of Austrian classics: Wiener schnitzel, goulash, Grüner Veltliner, and Red Bull. Under the bar counter is a glass display case showing off discs of pure brown smooth Sacher torte, with a coffee table book on the cake’s history and that of the eponymous hotel.
I am reliably informed by a subscriber that works in a nearby building that the schnitzel is quite good, but it is also quite out of bounds (on a return visit several weeks later, I discovered they do offer a vegetarian version of the goulash, which was delicious). Since the demise of the Maxburg, this may in fact be the only reliable place in Brussels to sate whatever schnitzel craving you might be suffering.
I make do, and resort to the desserts at the back of the menu. And, channelling my best Hans Landa impression, I go to town on an outsized slice of apfelstrudel washed down with a cold bottle of Almdudler, full sugar version please.
As I went to settle the bill, the woman at the payment terminal said something to me in German I couldn’t understand. It is a novelty in Brussels, capital of nominally trilingual Belgium, to be addressed with a “Gutentag, bonjour” rather than the more usual “Bonjour, goeiedag”. I fumbled an apology that I didn’t speak German, and she smiled half embarrassed, half confused. “Oh, I am so sorry,” she said. “It’s just, when I saw you, I thought you looked German.”
Super geil!
Tomorrow, we’re ticking off to another last-32 loser...
Thanks for reading - I’m writer Eoghan Walsh and this is my weekly free-to-subscribe newsletter about life in Brussels. If you like it and you’re not already subscribed, you can sign up here!
“… I thought you looked German.” It’s always nice to receive a compliment from a stranger.