John M. Edwards sings the praises of Vienna’s unique “Grand Café” Kaffeeklatches, perfect for any time of year
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“The [Café] Central is a place for people who have to kill time, so as
not to be killed by it. . . .”
--Alfred Polgar
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“I AM SIGMUND SPIELBERG!!!”
The obviously unemployable flaneur with umlaut eyes landed at my
marble-topped table without a proper invite, brusquely pushing aside a
Thonet wooden chair.
Brandishing a copy of Der Spiegel on a wooden rolling pin in his left
hand, and reeking from an unfortunate cologne resembling turning fruit
or female arousal or even Cutter ™, Sigmund sighed, coughing up and
swallowing a leech-like phlegm ball.
“Wow!” I breathed in snarky disbelief. “Any relation to the American
filmmaker Steven Spielberg?!”
“Why yes!” “Siggy” fogged up his Rayban aviator sunglasses and
polished the lenses on a starched white napkin (mine), smiling like a
demon out of Hieronymous Bosch. “Steven Spielberg is a distant cousin
of me. . . .”
We were at the legendary Grand Café (a classic Fin de Siecle “grand
café”), where reservations are suggested: (00 43 1-580 9120), and which
is perhaps Vienna’s most storied meeting place. Easily located right
on the first floor of the Grand Hotel Wien (9 Kaertnerstrasse) on
Vienna’s romantic Ringstrasse, this atmospheric kaffehaus (coffeehouse)
resembled any Danté-like circle of hell, with dark exhaust-spewing
Mercedes-Benzes prowling around outside on the famous circular road
like canny reef sharks, just waiting to take you on a “luxus” ride into
the other side of night.
However, inside, with its vaulted ceilings, marble pillars, wooden
hatracks, bentwood chairs, and foreign periodicals on roller sticks,
the Café Grand (or Grand Café) was once the haunt of such dastardly
villains as Lenin, Trotsky, and Freud.
It almost seemed like at any minute an anarchist, perhaps a Serbian
terrorist from “The Black Hand,” who assassinated The Archduke
Ferdinand in Sarajevo, thus sparking World War I, would come in and
roll a bowling-ball shaped bomb down the elaborately laid parquet
flooring.
In point of fact, though, I couldn’t tell offhand if “Siggy” was just
an apparent poseur dressed in a 19th-century-style frockcoat, more
Fraud than Freud. I instead took him at his word, mostly wretched
Englische.
“Wellkommen, Bienvenu, Welcome!” Siggy sang like Joel Gray in
“Cabaret.”
Everything was oh-so perfect, an epiphany: even if this spectacle was
one of the only non-smoking demesnes in all of Vienna. Why? Nothing
goes better with a cigar or a cigarette than a “machiatto”!
