Coffee Culture: My Six Favorite Local Cafes

I read about a Slovakian poet who lost an entire year in a Bratislava café, like an umbrella left behind in the rain. Which sounds like quite a commitment to sloth. Yet this is exactly what I love about settling into a good local café: for the price of a latte/mélange/milchcafe/koffee verkied, you buy yourself a comfortable place in the world for a few hours, and a momentary brush with the lives of others.

Space to think, gaze out the window, reflect on life, a step away from the responsibilities and distractions of your home or work environment, these are some of the benefits of heading down to your favorite café. The café is home to your urban family, an oasis of warmth and calm to retreat to from the world of constant movement, pressure to perform, demands and stress. And someone else does the dishes! No one expects anything of you in a café, except that you pay the bill.

When you’re traveling, and having to negotiate language, unfamiliar streets, and customs, finding a local cafe that feels welcoming is an essential part of the journey. Here are six of my favorites.

Café Prückel, Vienna, Austria

The authentic Viennese coffee house lends itself to long languorous conversations; even today I can see the knots of young intellectuals discussing thorny philosophical complications at Café Prückel. It’s one of the original Viennese café’s on the Ring, opened in 1903, and was renovated in the 1980s with a cool ’50s decor that enhances the suave air of conceptual nonchalance displayed by the clientele. Here it is perfectly acceptable to linger for hours alone with a newspaper, and echoes remain of the rich literary tradition, with writers and poets meeting to debate ideas, gossip, stay warm, and write. The last time I was in there I overheard an earnest, slender young man with trendy black-rimmed glasses and an Australian accent making slanderous comments about his theatrical partner: “He can’t sing, he can’t dance, he can’t act; he’s nothing but a dilettante!” I looked more closely and realized that the speaker was in fact an extremely well-known director (and no, I never found out who he was talking about).