What is your favourite type of holiday? Do you prefer eating over sightseeing? Well, then you’ve came to the right place! This blog post is my version of a foodie guide to Vienna. During my trip in May I checked out some popular restaurants, bars and street food spots as well as traditional cafes that are typical for Vienna. Here’s all the info you’ll need to find a great breakfast spot, a place with an amazing cold brew and… a pizza place where they make their pizzas in a disco ball.
It’s a second part of our Vienna guide so be sure to check out the first one HERE. It turned out to be so long, that I had to split it into two different blog posts. The first one is where you’ll find all the practical information about accomodation, public transport, the most important monuments as well as some alternative spots that you’ll not find in a traditional tourist guide. If you’re travelling across Europe you might want to check out other city guides that were written after our spontaneous Eurotrip. We went to Czech Republic, Hungary and Austria by car and Maria wrote about everything you might need to know when going on such a trip (info about parking spots, vignettes and prices). And I’ve compiled alternative guides to Brno and to Budapest which were the other destinations during our trip.
Before we get to the actual guide I’d like to recommend you to check out the Adamant Wanderer blog as well. It’s where we found lots of foodie inspiration. She’s been to Vienna a couple of times and keeps on adding to the list of restaurants, cafes and bars that she’s visited throughout the years.
Food market of dreams
I did mention the Naschmarkt food market in my previous post already. It turned out to be one of our favourite places in the entire Vienna. It’s a rather touristic spot but worth visiting anyway. The Naschmarkt has existed since the 16th century and it’s still going strong. It’s located in the middle of fancy tenement houses and about 1.5 kilometres long. So there’s plenty of space for small bars, restaurants and cafes with tables outside that you can enjoy on warm sunny days. There are cheese and wine shops, fruit and vegetable stalls and street food vendors. There’s something for vegetarians and something for meat lovers. Everyone should be happy here. You can eat here or buy some local delicacies to take with you as travel souvenirs. We did both.
We enjoyed Naschmarkt so much, that we visited it twice. The first time we came for lunch at NENI that is recommended all over the internet. It’s a chain of several restaurants across the globe specialising in Middle Eastern cuisine. In here you can get an amazingly creamy hummus, incredibly tasty falafels and delicious sandwiches. Prices are good, i gredients are fresh and portions were enough to fill us up. We decided to go for a few different sides to try as much of what’s on their menu as possible. We really enjoyed everything so you should definitely check this place for yourself. The next day we came back for breakfast, but we chose a different restaurant this time. And that was a mistake. The food at Naschmarkt Deli was mediocre and the staff wasn’t great.
The best breakfast spot in Vienna
Unlike the generic breakfast we had in Naschmarkt Deli, at Ulrich restaurant the food is amazing and the menu interesting. We stumbled across this place by accident when we were wandering around looking for a spot filled with locals rather than tourists. It’s usually a sign of good food. Ulrich was packed inside and out but we managed to get ourselves a little table in the outside seating area. There’s quite a lot of breakfast options to choose from so we spent a moment considering our options. We decided to order two different breakfast sets and split them between us to try both. We got one vegan and the other one with meat. I seriously don’t know which one was better. I highly recommend this place for a great breakfast in a chilled out atmospehere. We didn’t really want to leave.
If you don’t have time but want to grab some breakfast on the go check out one of the locales of Trześniewski cafe chain. The first one of them was opened over a hundred years ago by a Polish guy from Cracow. Their speciality is sandwiches. They have quite a selection with various ingredients to choose from. Some of the recipes are said to be unchanged from the start.
Disco pizza!
Is it possible to combine pizza with a disco ball? Sure! Just go to Disco Volante where they serve Neapolitan style pizza (and a really tasty one at that!) with a touch of extravagance. All of their pizzas come out of a proffesional custom-made pizza oven in a shape of a silver, shining, giant disco ball. I mean, what more can you want from life?! The place is quite trendy and there are both locals and tourists visiting it on a daily basis so be sure to book a table in advance. We didn’t do it but we managed to get a table after spending a few minutes primising a waiter that we’ll eat everything in under 30 minutes so that we free up the table before the group who did make a reservation arrives. We managed to do just that, but it wasn’t easy. Remeber, we spent two days mostly eating so we weren’t exactly hungry. And they serve decent sized pizzas. However they’re so good that we didn’t want to waste even a tiny bit. Check it out if you like unusual restaurants but value high quality ingredients at the same time.
When in Vienna go for coffee!
Vienna is a city of coffee. There’s a cafe on every street corner. And then some. There are traditional, more fancy places, where you can observe older gentlemen reading newspapers while munching on strudel, where the interior is royal as f*ck, the chandeliers are crystal and the staff wears suits. Also the coffee is usually not so great in such spots. But don’t worry, there are also modern, ‘instagram-friendly’ cafes where you can get yourself a delicious chemex coffee or a really good cold brew. When it comes to the second category of viennese coffee spots we prepared in advance. Well, not really we, but we did get ourselves a guide. Łukasz, a barista from Cophi in Warsaw who sometimes writes for European Coffee Trip, made us a list of must-visit spots.
But lets start with the classics. We wanted to visit either Cafe Sperl or Cafe Central, both renown traditional cafes characteristic for Vienna. In the end we ended up in Cafe Central, due to it’s location. The place was packed with tourists, and we aven had to wait in a line outside, so it wasn’t the most pleasent of experiences but we decided that when in Vienna we have to get a taste of history. After a few minutes in a queue we were invited in by a waiter in an elegant suit and sat at a table next to the door. The cafe was opened in 1876 and the interior wasn’t changed much in the meantime so it does feel a bit like a museum. But a museum filled with cake so that’s fine. We looked at the cakes displayed in the glass cabinet in the center of the restaurant but we decided to put our trust in the Adamant Wanderer and we ordered Kaiserschmarrn. As the author of the above mentioned blog explains ‘it’s a kind of fluffy omlette that’s deconstructed and served warm with fruit and powdered sugar’. She also mentioned that the portion is enormous and she wasn’t wrong. We ordered one to share and it was definitely enough. So here’s a ‘Vienna lifehack’: come to Cafe Central and order Kaiserschmarrn to get a decent amount of food inside you, feel fancy, but save some coin at the same time.
As far as the cafes recommended by Łukasz go, we visited three of them: Coffee Pirates, Kaffe Modul and People on Caffeine. We didn’t have enough time to visit a minimal trendy interior of Kaffemik, but the photos of it definitely reminded us of Kafe Friedrich that we went to in Brno. We enjoyed Coffee Pirates, located right next to the University, the most. The interior is cozy, there’s plenty of tables so you can chill out and have a conversation in peace. They serve an amazing cold brew that will set you up for the day. Next we went to People on Caffeine, but only managed to stay there a few minutes. They were in the process of closing up when we entered, but were kind enough to sell us coffee to go anyway. We ordered a frozen coffee to go in Kaffee Modul as well. Here the interior is tiny so we didn’t find a place to seat. But that’s ok, at least we didn’t waste time seating inside, when there was so much more of Vienna to see!
Let’s go for a drink!
After all that food it’s definitely time for some alcohol to help with the digestive process. During our short stay in Vienna we only managed yo visit to places. We didn’t really need more since we had a bar selling local beer inside our hostel. Talking of beer, we started of in a pub because we felt like trying some craft beers. It was quite close to the place we stayed at but I can’t remember the name of the place. It was a generic craft beer spot anyway so you can go anywhere, to be honest. The next evening we decided to go for drinks instead. We ended up in a popular spot called If Dogs Run Free, specialising in coctails. What more can you need other than a name inspired by a Bob Dylan song, good reviews on the internet and the promise of decent prices. We tried their gin based coctails and thought they were good (altough I preferred the ones I had in Brno). We were sat outside but the interior is pretty cool with a 3D geometric ceilling above the bar.
And that’s the end of our little adventure in Vienna. This time for real. There won’t be any more blog posts, I promise. It’s a great city with some great food spots. We stumbled upon some restaurants that we’ll remember for a long time. It was definitely enough to make us want to come back and eat some more. Let us know if you know some more amazing spots in Vienna that we need to check out on our next trip!
