Cafés in Austria Vienna

The siege of 1683: legend and record

Austria's favorite coffee story is a legend. After the Ottoman army was beaten at the Kahlenberg on 12 September 1683, the tale goes, it left sacks of coffee beans behind, and Georg Franz Kolschitzky, who had fought on the Austrian side, received them along with permission to sell coffee and opened Vienna's first coffee house.³

The real Kolschitzky, born around 1640 in Poland, was an interpreter and courier who spied for Vienna during the siege and was among the first to receive a privilege to serve coffee.⁴ The Neue Deutsche Biographie calls the first-coffee-house tradition unattested. Armenian merchants set the pace: Johannes Diodato held a personal privilege from 1685, and Isaak de Luca, a Viennese citizen from 23 March 1697, helped establish Kaffeesiederei, coffee boiling, as a regular trade.⁸

Kaffeesieder, blockades and a heritage listing

Café owners once roasted their own beans and mixed their own blends, which is why Viennese proprietors still call themselves Kaffeesieder (coffee boilers).³

Napoleon's Continental Blockade of 1803 to 1813 made beans so expensive that it nearly ruined the trade. After Austria joined the blockade in 1808, coffee houses were allowed to serve wine and warm food for the first time.⁵ The owners' association, the Klub der Wiener Kaffeehausbesitzer, was formed in 1956, and Viennese coffee house culture entered Austria's inventory of intangible cultural heritage, kept by the Austrian UNESCO Commission, in 2011.⁵

Julius Meinl and the roasters

Julius Meinl began as a grocer. The first Julius Meinl opened a spice shop in central Vienna in 1862, selling green coffee beans along with cocoa, tea, spices, rice and sugar, and in 1877 he introduced a roasting process of his own design.⁶ By 1913 the firm was the largest coffee roaster in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its flagship store at Graben 19 opened in 1950.⁶

Salzburg's Café Tomaselli and the west

Salzburg's tourist board calls Café Tomaselli Austria's oldest coffee house. It traces its roots to 1700, when the Frenchman Johann Fontaine opened the Cafegewölb Fontaine in the Goldgasse, more a meeting place for students and bohemians than a café.⁷ Anton Staiger took over the licence in 1764 and moved it to the Alter Markt; the confectioner Carl Tomaselli bought the business in 1852 and renamed it. Mozart is said to have been a regular, drinking almond milk, and the pastry waitress has been a fixture since 1853.⁷

The west also drinks the most. In the 2025 survey, Tyrol, Vorarlberg and Salzburg averaged 2.98 cups a day, the highest of any region.¹

Vienna

The capital of the coffee house drinks less coffee than the rest of Austria. Viennese respondents averaged 2.58 cups a day in 2025, against 2.75 nationally, and 69.0% of Viennese drank coffee daily, the lowest share of any region.¹ The coffee houses themselves multiplied in the 19th century, from about 150 in 1819 to about 600 around 1900.³ Julius Meinl's flagship store has stood at Graben 19, in the 1st district, since 1950.⁶