Vienna--Our Hearts Are Taken

Snow, later it obscured the Alps

Friday, March 11, Vienna.  It's been a very busy few days, very full, and very active.   We left Munich on the Railjet Austrian Rail (OBB) train late morning on Tuesday.   Cold and dreary in Munich, with a bit of snow on the roofs and chill in the air.   By the time the train reached the Alps, not very far, it looked like a blizzard outside.   We saw nothing of the mountains.  Salzburg was a quick stop in the snow. Once we got on to the plains of Austria, the climate changed and by the time we arrived at the Westbahnhof in Vienna, it was quite a nice day, although it has NOT been warm the entire time we have been here.   The food on the train was infinitely superior to the trash meal on the TGV from Paris to Munich.  Good beer, a good salad, and a very pleasant bowl of spicy Hungarian goulash.  The TGV does better on seat comfort, though.

The taxi drive to the apartment was quick, but circuitous around the huge imperial buildings of the city.   Our building dating from 1687 just after the Viennese rebuffed the last attack by the Ottomans, has been restored and turned into a group of apartments mainly rented to musicians.  There are not many buildings in the city that are this old.  Much of Wien was built during the 19th century outside the Ring.  

Our hosts, a flutist and an opera singer, are friends from performances in Washington and knew of the apartment's availability from the owner of the building.   It's a lovely one-bedroom, very modern, small kitchen and very nice bath.  It's also seven minutes walk and two minutes on a #49 tram from the Ring and about 15 minutes walk to the Staatsoper.

We of course took off immediately the examine the Neubau (Noy-bow) neighborhood, full of restaurants, exquisite shops and lots of beer halls.  It's clearly a younger person's hangout, but at the same time a residential neighborhood for all.   The cobbled gassen (gasse means alley in German but these gassen are mostly one-way streets as opposed to the strassen which are two-way boulevards) climb up and down the hills through the five story apartment buildings.  The trams weave through them at relatively high speed.   

We found good groceries at the local supermarket, not realizing that you have to weigh your produce before checkout.   A friendly clerk helped out.   We carried out milk, fruit, yoghurt and müsli back to the apartment, and then headed out to view the city.   We chose for dinner the Schnitzelwirst Restaurant recommended by our friends in Paris.  It's quite down home to say the least.  Like many restaurants here the front section is for smokers, and reeks of tobacco, but the deeper rooms are full of tables that are often communal.   The wiener schnitzel John had and the chicken schnitzel Ben had came in huge portions. Coupled with potatoes and cucumber salad the meals overfaced us, but we enjoyed them.

St Stephen's Cathedral

Demel's chestnut tort and strudel

Wednesday we started to "do" Vienna.  We did a self-guided walking tour (thanks to Rick Steve's book loaned us by neighbors Hannah and David) that took us from the Ring to the Opera and then into the zentrum, with St Stephen's cathedral, the Graben main shopping street for pedestrians only, and the rest.   We did not have sacher tort but instead went to Demels for pastry and strudel.  It's a very lovely exclusive old bakery and coffee house:  John enjoyed a chestnut tort and Ben an apple strudel.  The machiato for Ben and a mélange coffee for John were superb.  Service from a delightful waitress who led us to the tables of cakes and pastries for our choice was fun.   Clearly she has dealt with people for years.  This was our calorific and cholesterol-filled lunch.

St Peter's Vienna

Along the way we had stopped at St Peter's Church, off the Graben, and noted a 3PM Bach organ recital.   We went and listened a well-performed group of Bach pieces for 40 or so minutes.  Sitting facing a baroque altar with baroque architecture surround you is quite an experience.  Makes up for the cold weather.

We enjoyed the rest of our walk through the old city and then climbed back up the hill for a nap and then dinner.

We explored various listings and decided on a central European restaurant, Kristian's Monastiri, about two blocks from our apartment.  Dinner started with the decision that we would try four wines by the glass (two white and two red) and would choose what we like from the menu.  The whites came from both the Vienna region, a Setzer grüner veltliner, and from the southern province, Burgenland, an Esterhazy sauvignon blanc.  Both were lovely, though we preferred the gruner.  The reds were both from Burgunland, a pinot noir from Heinrich, and a haideboden, Austrian grape, from Umathum.  Very nice.   They went well with our meals:   Ben started with warm vichyssoise, while John had gin-soaked goat cheese.  Ben continued with a lobster and trout salmon dish and a salad while John enjoyed beef cheeks, an Austrian specialty.

Hundertwasser's Work

Even the bathrooms curve

Thursday we headed out to new places where English was not often heard. We visited the Kunst Haus Museum Hundertwasser, dedicated to the work of Friedensreich Hundertwasser, an architect-artist who believed everything is in spirals and constantly in motion, including designing houses where the floors aren't flat and the walls wave. There were two art exhibits at the museum on photography. One by Anita Witek was truly enthralling as it drew you into her pictures. The other by Peter Piller, who uses images drawn from ads was OK, but not great. 

We lunched at a small Chinese restaurant on simple vegetable and pork stir-fries;  the meal finished with Chinese plum wine instead of a fortune cookie.  John enjoyed it.  

From there we went to the Museum of Applied Art (MAK) on the Ring.   Ben had seen a  story in the NY Times on the work of Josef Frank, now here in a definitive show. He was an architect-designer who believed that houses should be comfortable, a middle-class view of homes and designed his homes and furniture with that in mind.  Quite a difference from the starkness and cold rigidityof Le Corbusier or the Bauhaus.  Instead, more in line with, but more comfortable than, Frank Lloyd Wright.  What's interesting is that many of the fabric patterns and furniture he designed in the mid-20th century work are still currently in production.

Our feet were tired by that time so we took trams back to Neubau (you have to change from a #2 to a #49--we're getting quite good at this!).

Sea bass at Kulinarium 7

Viennese bakery: bread in many forms

We had noted that there was a new fish restaurant across the street from the flat, the Kulinarium 7, so we looked it up.   The chef, Toni Bjelancic, started his career in NY at the Culinary Institute and then moved to Philadelphia,  He had been working throughout Scandinavia and has now settled in Vienna, not far from his native Dalmatia, part of Croatia.  He is the son of a fisherman.  The food is lovely:  fresh fish from the Adriatic combined with Croatian wines made for a lovely dinner.   We had four white wines to go with the meal:  graševina from Slavonia, two malvasias from Istria and a chardonnay also from Slavonia.   We did the tasting menu which started with a mixed seafood antipasto (octopus, mussels with tomato, slice of cooked tuna with anchovy, shrimp on creamed mashed potatoes, eggplant and zucchini, tempura small sardines, olives and caperberries), then a carpaccio of Adriatic tuna with lemon sauce, a slice of cucumber skin and a mache salad.  The third taste was  ravioli stuffed with paté de fois in cream sauce and we finished with a filet of sea bass on tomato couli and sliced potatoes. We were too full for dessert.

Haydn down the street!

Our friends gave us tickets for a concert tomorrow of chamber music at the Staatsoper at 11 AM by one of them, and then tomorrow night we go to the Opera itself.   Today we will explore shopping and the Hofburg and see what the Imperial Hapsburg home life was like. Clearly the Austro-Hungariajn Empire was quite a place...a multi-national, ramshackle place but growing very quickly by the beginning of the First World War that ended it.