Leyla Falkenau
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vienna

Leyla's Vienna

The fourth and fifth districts, where the family has had a flat since the 1920s and nobody has dusted since. Coffee houses, the Ring in rain, and one day at the lake as a coda.

Leyla in a camel coat walking down a cobbled street in Vienna in fog

Servus. I was born in Madrid and grew up between three cities, but the flat where I learned to be quiet is in Wieden, the fourth district, two floors up, sheets over the furniture most of the year. This is not the Vienna of the postcards; the postcards are twenty minutes’ walk north. This is the Vienna where my father restores pianos in a back courtyard in Margareten, where my grandmother still has an account at a café she hasn’t visited since 2019, and where it rains on the Ring in a way that makes the whole city look like it’s remembering something. Then one day at the Attersee, because every Vienna story ends at a lake. The von went in 1919; the coffee-house habits survived the republic.

Wieden and Margareten

Café Goldegg

My grandmother’s café, which is to say the one she stopped going to and still calls hers. Jugendstil from 1910, dark wood panelling, black marble tables, green plush that has seen things. There’s a billiard table nobody young uses and a corner where, before 1941, people who’d been banned from everything else met to keep meeting. Oma has a table. Nobody sits at it. I did, once, and the waiter looked at me the way you look at someone wearing their grandmother’s coat.

Practical: Argentinierstraße 49, corner Goldeggasse, 1040. Daily, morning till eight. A weekday afternoon with the papers; order a Melange and don’t rush it.

Vollpension

A café where the cakes are baked by actual grandmothers who come in on shifts, so if you’ve ever wanted to be scolded for leaving the crumb you’ve found your place. Mismatched chairs, somebody’s lampshade, a Gugelhupf that tastes like a Sunday in 2006. They’ll tell you it’s not a classic Viennese coffee house and they’re right; it’s the kitchen table version. Konsti refuses to come. Konsti is wrong.

Practical: Schleifmühlgasse 16, 1040. Daily, eight till eight. Mid-afternoon, when the second cake of the day is cut.

Karlskirche

A baroque church with two columns stolen from Rome’s idea of itself and a dome you can see from our kitchen window if you lean. Inside, it has been a place of worship since 1738 and a place for tourists since roughly the same time. The pond in front freezes some winters. I have sat on its edge at every age from six to twenty-seven, and the church has not changed its expression once. Evening Mass is at six; go then, even if you don’t, because the light through the dome at that hour is the argument.

Practical: Karlsplatz 10, 1040. Visits Monday to Saturday from nine, Sunday from midday; Mass at eighteen hundred. Dusk, from the pond side.

Naschmarkt and the Saturday flea market

The long market between Karlsplatz and Kettenbrückengasse, where the fourth district stops being polite. Fruit, pickles, a Persian stall where the owner heard my surname once and now greets me in Farsi, which undoes me every time. On Saturday mornings the flea market opens at the far end at half past six and by nine the good boxes are gone. I found a 1960s postcard of Menton here for a euro’s worth of courage and haven’t told my grandmother.

Practical: Wienzeile, 1060/1040, U4 Kettenbrückengasse. Market Monday to Saturday from six; flea market Saturdays, six-thirty to two. Early, with cash and a bag.

Silberwirt and the Schlossquadrat

A courtyard of four restaurants off Margaretenplatz, in a block of old houses that used to be a small palace and then wasn’t. The Silberwirt is the Gasthaus of the four: Schnitzel, Marillenknödel in season, a garden with chestnut trees where the fifth district comes to pretend it’s a village. My father’s workshop is three streets from here. He is usually out. The Silberwirt is usually open. I’ve learned which one to rely on.

Practical: Schloßgasse 21, 1050, at Margaretenplatz. Daily from midday, kitchen till ten. Summer garden at seven; winter, the back room.

Mariahilf edge and the Secession

Café Sperl

The coffee house they film when they need a coffee house. Since 1880, billiard tables you can actually play on, a Thonet chair for every mood, newspapers on sticks. The waiters have the correct amount of disdain. My grandmother was brought here at eighteen by her aunt and told to order “like an adult”, which in 1966 meant a Kleiner Brauner and no questions. I order the same and ask too many.

Practical: Gumpendorfer Straße 11, 1060, six minutes from the Wieden flat. Monday to Saturday from seven, Sunday from ten; closed Sundays in July and August. Weekday mornings, the billiard room end.

phil

A café-bookshop where the books on the walls are for sale and so, I suspect, are some of the chairs. Four thousand titles, a laptop ban, DJs some nights, a garden in summer. It’s where Vienna under forty goes to feel it has a living room. I bought a secondhand Zweig here and read it on the train to the lake. Zweig at the Attersee is cheating; everything sounds true.

Practical: Gumpendorfer Straße 10–12, 1060, across from Sperl, which is the joke. Daily, late; Monday from two. A rainy Sunday, nine till whenever.

Secession

The white box with the golden cabbage on top, built in 1898 by artists who’d had enough of their elders. In the basement, Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze, painted in 1902 for an exhibition and meant to be thrown away afterwards, now the reason to come. I went the morning after a long phone call with my brother about money and stood in front of the wall where the knight sets off, and understood nothing, and felt better. Art does that if you let it be rude to you.

Practical: Friedrichstraße 12, 1010, behind the Naschmarkt. Tuesday to Sunday, ten till six. Opening hour, before the groups.

The Ring in rain

Café Prückel

On the Ring where the Stubenring curves, since 1903, with an interior from the fifties that is either dated or perfect depending on the weather. In rain, perfect. Tall windows onto the tram stop, a room where you can watch the 2 slide past with its lights on at four in the afternoon and feel, for once, that you’re on the right side of the glass. The waiters here let you stay for the length of a letter. I’ve tested this.

Practical: Stubenring 24, 1010, tram 2 stops outside. Daily, half past eight till ten. A wet afternoon, window table, the back page of a newspaper you can’t read.

Hotel Sacher and the Blaue Bar

The one hotel, because my grandmother’s wedding lunch in 1971 was in a dining room like this and she has never said whether she enjoyed it. The Blaue Bar is small, blue, velvet, and wholly indifferent to your day. The torte is the torte; have it once for the story, then order the Apfelstrudel for yourself. In the rain the lobby smells of wet wool and good coats. Konsti stays here when he’s in town for work and says it’s on expenses. I’ve stopped asking whose.

Practical: Philharmonikerstraße 4, 1010, behind the Opera. Café daily from seven, Blaue Bar from midday until late. A night when it’s raining and you need to be somewhere that isn’t the flat.

Coda: one day at the Attersee

The Gustav Klimt path at Kammer-Schörfling

Klimt spent his summers on this lake from 1900 to 1916 and painted the water as if it were a wall. The walking path through Schörfling and Kammer marks the places he stood; it’s free and open all year and nobody checks tickets, so in November it’s you, a heron, and a painter who’s been dead a century. Schloss Kammer, the one he painted from the boat, is still there across the bay, private, white, and not for sale as far as I know. Ours is further down the lake, on the side the sun leaves first. I’m not telling you where.

Practical: Start at Schörfling or Kammer am Attersee, an hour and a half from Vienna by train and bus. Free, all seasons. A still morning; the lake is a mirror before the wind gets up at eleven.

Attersee-Schifffahrt

Three boats that run the length of the lake in summer and stop for the winter on the first of November, except for the special cruises: a goose dinner afloat in November, Advent brunch in December with the mountains frosted and the lake black. My grandmother has never once taken the steamer, and that’s all I’ll say about that. I go once a year, alone, to the far end and back, and write her the letter she won’t read until it’s warm again.

Practical: Landings around the lake, including Kammer, Attersee and the new one at Steinbach. Scheduled service roughly spring to end of October; winter special sailings by booking. Late season, last boat, the upper deck.

— L.

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