Vienna in winter: the case for the slow imperial city

It’s January in Vienna and the woman two tables over at Café Sperl is on her third newspaper. She came in around eleven. It is now nearly two. The waiter has brought her a small fresh glass of water twice without being asked. This is how you stay in a Viennese coffee house: indefinitely. No one will rush you. The whole institution is built around the right to occupy a marble-topped table for as long as you can read.

Why I keep coming back

My first visit was in 2006 for a conference I no longer remember. I came back to Vienna two years later for a long weekend and stayed eleven days. The city has a quality I have only otherwise found in Kyoto: it has been a capital long enough that the rituals of its public life — the coffee house, the opera, the Heuriger wine tavern in the hills — have become quietly perfected. Nothing flashy. Just the slow accumulation of getting things right.

It’s also one of the most liveable cities I know. Public transport runs to a minute. The opera is genuinely cheap if you stand. The water is from the Alps. The bread is good.

Where to base yourself

Neubau (7th district), west of the Ringstraße. Boutique-y, cafés on every corner, walkable to the Hofburg and the museums. The MuseumsQuartier is on its edge.

Leopoldstadt (2nd district), across the Danube Canal. The old Jewish quarter, now home to a young, multinational, faintly hip energy. The Augarten park, the Karmelitermarkt, the bridge to the centre.

Wieden (4th district) for a quiet, residential, well-located base.

Avoid anything immediately around the Stephansdom for a longer stay. Beautiful by day, dead by night, the prices reflect the postcode.

What to actually do

Stand at the opera. The Wiener Staatsoper sells Stehplatz — standing-room tickets — for about €15 about ninety minutes before the curtain. You queue in a side entrance. You get a small leaning pole. The acoustics are perfect from up there. You can stay for one act and leave; the Viennese do this all the time. I’ve seen Don Giovanni this way three times.

Spend a full afternoon at the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Don’t try to see everything. Walk to the Bruegel room and stay. Six paintings by the same family. The Bruegels — Hunters in the Snow especially, in January — are one of the great rooms in Western painting. The café in the museum, on the upper rotunda, is also one of the most beautiful interiors in the city; have lunch.

Go to a coffee house and stay for four hours. Pick one. Café Sperl for the old marble and the billiard table. Café Hawelka for the bohemian feel and the Buchteln (sweet dumplings) at 10 p.m. Café Central for the postcard photo (it gets ten-deep queues now, alas). Order a Verlängerter, ask for a glass of tap water (it will come unprompted but you can request it again), and write something.

Visit the Belvedere not for the Klimt but for the second floor. Yes, The Kiss is here and it’s worth seeing once. But the museum’s second-floor rooms — the Egon Schiele self-portraits, the Kokoschka, the Vienna Secession — are the deeper find. Schiele died at 28 in the 1918 flu epidemic; the paintings, mostly of himself, are unforgettable.

Take the U4 to Heiligenstadt and walk into the vineyards. Vienna is the only major capital with working wine vineyards inside the city limits. Walk up through the Beethovengang, the path Beethoven walked while composing the Pastoral symphony, and find a Heuriger — a seasonal wine tavern with cold cuts and bread and a glass of young white wine. Mayer am Pfarrplatz is the famous one; Zahel in the south is quieter.

Where to eat

Viennese food is heavy in the best sense: Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, Beuschel, Apfelstrudel. Don’t fight it.

Plachutta (centre) — The institution for Tafelspitz, boiled beef in broth, with the marrow bone and the chive sauce. Reserve.

Figlmüller — Two locations, both famous for an enormous wiener schnitzel. The original on Wollzeile is better.

Skopik & Lohn (Leopoldstadt) — Modernised Austrian, an inked-ceiling dining room that looks deliberate but is the result of an artist getting bored at a party in 2003. The food is excellent.

Tian Bistro — Vegetarian, an unusual move in this city of veal, and surprisingly excellent.

Café Prückel for Apfelstrudel with hot vanilla sauce in winter, eaten in late afternoon, with the snow falling outside, while you read the German edition of Die Presse you can’t actually understand.

When to come

January and February. The off-season is the secret. The opera is performing, the museums are quiet, the snow falls on the Ringstraße, and the coffee houses are full of locals and not tourists. The cold is real — pack a wool coat — but the Viennese have indoor culture in a way few other European cities can match.

December has Christmas markets, which are pretty and crowded; the Spittelberg one is the best.

April and October are reliable, less atmospheric than winter, less crowded than summer.

Practical notes

• Visa: Schengen.
• Money: Card universally.
• Transport: The U-Bahn is among the cleanest and most efficient in Europe. A 72-hour ticket at €17 is the sweet spot. Trams are reliable.
• Language: German; English is widespread, but a Grüß Gott on entering a shop is appreciated; the response will tell you a lot about whether you’ve found a tourist place or not.
• Tipping: Round up to the next euro or so; for restaurants, 10% is the upper end.
• Standing-room opera: The line forms at the side entrance on Operngasse roughly 90 minutes before curtain. €13–18 depending on performance. Cash or card.

A final thought

Vienna is one of the few cities I’ve written about that consistently meets the cliché. The coffee houses really are like that. The opera really is that good for that little. The cake really is that important. The Viennese really do conduct entire afternoons of public life at marble tables, with one cup of coffee and several glasses of water and the day’s newspapers fanned out in the wooden newspaper-holders the waiters bring without being asked.

The city has a deserved reputation for being slightly stiff, slightly slow to warm to strangers. I’ve found this true in the abstract and almost never in the specific. The waiter learns your face. The neighbour at the next table will eventually nod. The lady at the bakery starts setting aside the Topfengolatschen before you ask.

What Vienna teaches, if you let it, is that the right pace for almost everything is slower than you think. Sit down. Order. Stay.