VIENNA
Vienna’s town hall in the snow
hungry traveller.
The cold-and-frosty months are the prime time to enjoy this grand city’s bare-branched elegance and architectural opulence, the chill air sharpening the appetite for hearty Austrian cooking. Alexander Lobrano sniffs out the best places to indulge
The woman in the cocoa-coloured mink coat saw my double-take as I approached. “You thought I was walking an invisible dog, “ she chuckled. It’s true – from afar her Dalmatian blended into the snowy Vienna cityscape so well I’d almost missed it.
I was walking off a midday meal at the Rote Bar, the crimson-satinand- velvet candy-box of a dining room at the Hotel Sacher (sacher. com), where I’d eaten the very same meal I’ve had there on every visit to Vienna since my first one some 25 years ago. Kräftige tafelspitzsuppe mit frittaten (deeply reduced beef bouillon garnished with thinly sliced crepes) was followed by tafelspitz (beef topside poached in the same bouillon) and then, inevitably, a slice of Sacher-Torte, the chocolate-glazed, apricot jam-filled chocolate cake created by chef Franz Sacher in 1832, with a good lashing of schlagobers (‘whipped cream’ just sounds so dull in comparison).
“So, Mein Herr, did you enjoy your lunch? “ the woman with the dog asked. And then I understood why this formidable older lady in a very formal city had spoken to me, a stranger – she’d been dining at this clubby place, too. “The Rote Bar is one of my favourite restaurants, “ I replied. “The gentleman has good taste, “ she said, nodding her head approvingly and dismissing me with an “Auf Wiedersehen “. She continued her walk and so did I.
With its trees stripped for winter, the proud imperial city stood disrobed but dignified in the pearly grey late-afternoon light. Yet for all its magnificent vanilla-and-cream painted palaces, opulent shop-fronts and plush cafés, the enduring persona of Vienna isn’t that of a grande dame in furs walking her beautiful dog. Instead, it’s that of a broad-chested cavalryman in a wintry, ash-gray flannel uniform. The military cadences of this cityremain strong, even in the small neutral country that Austria is today. Vienna is a proudly disciplined and orderly place, with a deep nostalgia for the days when it was, up until 1914, the capital of the greatest European empire. Today, it’s a serious but deeply sentimental city, where the prosperity brought on by the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the renewal of economic ties with its historic hinterland – Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, among other countries – can never entirely disperse the poignant aura of Hapsburg twilight that hangs over the city.
Along with a deep love of music, the other way the city reconciles its cerebral side with its softer one is by eating and drinking exceptionally well without making too much of a fuss about it. The Viennese have a deep love of traditional