I stepped off a train in Vienna three decades ago and have been finding my way back to it ever since. Some cities seem to encapsulate a feeling, a mood; Vienna has inspired countless artists, not least Billy Joel, who in the 1970s named a song after the city. “Slow down, you’re doing fine,” goes the refrain. “You can afford to lose a day or two….” Vienna makes it easy to do those things. In the beloved indie romance Before Sunrise, Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy meet on a train, then alight in Vienna, where they shoot the breeze and meander the streets until dawn. Rarely crowded, the city offers space to think, the potential for chance encounters. And while some European cities clear out in summer, leaving the door open for visitors to shut behind them, Vienna is always itself.
I’ve done a lot of meandering here myself, passing curlicues of violin and contraltos that spiral out from behind shuttered windows. Some Polaroids: in the winter, snow crisping the old rooftops like cake frosting, skating the frozen pathways of the town hall with my young son. Me, in black tie after a classical ball, shoes as shiny as eels, devouring hot dogs and Champagne; dangling my legs over the Donaukanal with a beer in hand, sunshine on the graffiti. One time, on my way to the Leopold museum, I squeeze through a street choir from Beijing, dressed in pink and singing “Edelweiss.” When wanting a coffee, I choose a bentwood chair in the ’60s time capsule Café Korb, its waiters reliably indifferent, watched over by portraits of its owner, the redoubtable actor Susanne Widl; for schnitzel, I go to Glacis Beisl, submerged in foliage just feet from the upcycled Hapsburg pomp of the MuseumsQuartier.
Vienna, which regularly tops polls for quality of life, seems run by people who actually like its citizenry. Which other city installs misting posts to cool itself down in summer or names its streets to correct the gender imbalance (recently christened: Janis Joplin Promenade and Hannah Arendt Platz)? A new waterfront is emerging on Danube Island at Pier 22, lido-style, with ladders for swimming and picnic spots for families. In the summer everyone makes for the water like ducks, diving from pedal boats into the Old Danube and submerging their feet in the mud, the urban skyline smudged with reeds. “Everything just works so well,” my Viennese friend Philip tells me. “The classical tradition can hang heavy, and sometimes I wish my city was a little more fast-moving, but then…I can afford to live with my boyfriend in a high-ceilinged 19th-century apartment not far from the center of town.”
For a sense of perspective: In the Wien Museum, newly rehoused in an angular modernist space on Karlsplatz, a wooden whale that once advertised fish suppers in the Prater amusement park floats above a model of gnarled St. Stephen’s Cathedral. At a mixing desk inspired by paintings in the museum’s collection, I choose a picture of an 18th-century coffeehouse (after all, this is the city that brought the drink from the Levant to the West, percolating ideas, conviviality, and revolution) and slowly fade in the sounds of a gypsy fiddle and the hubbub of chatter.
Once the crossroads of an empire, fizzing with energy, after the wars Vienna retreated and became a Cold War backwater, a onetime A-lister turned disheveled has-been. When Richard Bassett, a correspondent for London‘s The Times, lived here in the early 1980s, you could have heard a pin drop on weekends. Despite having taken up residence in the heart of a once great capital, he wrote, he heard…nothing. Sundays are still quiet, and a little melancholic. “Sometimes we hop on the boat to Bratislava just for the hell of it, because the shops open there,” one local in a bar tells me.
There’s a saying that if the world were about to end, then better head to Vienna, as everything happens here 20 years later. But actually, it’s just been quietly getting on with things, and perhaps it’s the rest of the world that’s been catching up. The farm-to-fork ethos has been ingrained for decades, as has biodynamic farming, inspired by the teachings of Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner. I meet with tousled-haired chef Elihay Berliner, who came here from Israel via Paris. “This is a city that acts like a village,” he tells me. “It’s super accommodating.” He had planned to stay for a weekend and never left, eventually cofounding his restaurant COP (Collection of Produce) to showcase the sheer abundance of ingredients in the area. “When it comes to asparagus and strawberries, no one can touch us,” he says. “It used to annoy me that the only places sourcing good produce were fine-dining restaurants, so I set out to open a place that was relaxed but dedicated to the ingredients. We even help our suppliers with the harvest.”
I walk past the Ährnst bakery on Bürggasse a couple of times before spotting its vintage signage. Inside, Julian Lubinger is wearing a yellow cap that matches the pendants hanging above. “Vienna got a little lazy, dining out on its reputation,” says the young baker, as he arranges his ranks of deeply tanned croissants, which are as sculptural as the Baroque frills of the Hofburg. “But it’s easy to start something new here. In Austria the idea of personal service, of small, family-run shops, never went away.”
There’s a sense, now, of something changing, a sharpening of intent. Lying between Eastern and Western Europe, Vienna is well situated to connect the two. New night-train services link it to more cities around the continent, including Amsterdam. Fresh hotels are opening. A young generation of chefs are gathering ingredients from Austria’s valleys and woodlands, carving out a more relaxed terroir. Its contemporary art scene thrives in the long shadows of Klimt and Schiele. Still making a statement 125 years on, with its kippah of golden leaves, the Secession building on Friedrichstrasse hosts avant-garde shows. A few years back, there were even, reportedly, nocturnal orgies. On my last visit, I, fully clothed, merely put on a set of headphones and listened to Beethoven’s Ninth while walking under the byzantine frieze inspired by the composer, before heading back out to the street and on to wherever the city chose to take me next.
Where to stay in Vienna
Gazing out from my breakfast table at the Amauris Vienna onto the Ringstrasse, the 19th-century boulevard that wraps around the Old Town, I watch the familiar parade of cars, red-and-white trams, and the occasional horse-drawn carriage. Many of the city’s most distinctive hotels are in the first district (like Paris, Vienna is divided into numbered districts), to be joined this summer by a new Mandarin Oriental. I have a soft spot for Vienna’s velvety classics, like the family-run Hotel Sacher—just ignore the queues for the heavily hyped cake at the café and make for the Blaue Bar instead. My room at the Amauris feels like a Chanel gift box, with bold-colored contemporary furniture and a black-framed four-poster beneath an icy chandelier.
Shier and more retiring is Hotel Zur Wiener Staatsoper, hidden in plain sight behind two baroque caryatids near the opera house. It reminds me of the elegant fürstenpensions that once peppered the city after the war—lodgings of genteel Biedermeier hospitality, owned by impoverished aristocrats. British designer Nina Campbell did the delicate interiors, which include pretty wallpapers and lots of faded porcelain. I usually go on the trail of Adolf Loos, Vienna’s forthright Jazz Age architect, when I’m in town, but before Christmas I made a detour to the Anantara Palais Hansen Vienna Hotel. Designed by Theophil Hansen, the man behind much of the city’s imperial skyline, it has recently been repositioned but locals still know it as the Kempinski. The hotel is ramping up its spa and has one of the most dramatic people-watching lobbies in town, anchored by a gold-roofed bar.
Imperial Riding School, Autograph Collection, was once Franz Josef I’s equestrian hangout; its monastery-like interiors (I walk in craning my neck at the vaulted ceilings) have been tamed into a surprisingly intimate space that feels like a salon writ large with little pockets of jade-colored seating and mirrored panels.
