Café Hawelka
Vienna, Austria
The read// why locals go
Café Hawelka is a Viennese coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse, a few steps off the Graben, and it has resisted every temptation to modernise. The Viennese coffeehouse sits on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage, and the reason is exactly this: a room where one coffee buys an afternoon, where the newspapers hang on wooden racks and nobody hurries a table. Hawelka is among the most storied of them, dark-walled and close-packed, kept deliberately as it was. Around €8 covers coffee and something sweet. A Vienna institution that still works as a café rather than as a museum of one.
Good to know
Opening hours
Dorotheergasse 6, 1010 — Vienna
The read// why locals go
Café Hawelka is a Viennese coffeehouse on the Dorotheergasse, a few steps off the Graben, and it has resisted every temptation to modernise. The Viennese coffeehouse sits on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage, and the reason is exactly this: a room where one coffee buys an afternoon, where the newspapers hang on wooden racks and nobody hurries a table. Hawelka is among the most storied of them, dark-walled and close-packed, kept deliberately as it was. Around €8 covers coffee and something sweet. A Vienna institution that still works as a café rather than as a museum of one.
