The Vienna pastry tour

Press, 24 February 1987, Page 29

The Vienna pastry tour

By

NINO LO BELLO

In the Danube metropolis of Vienna — indeed a capital city with “capital gains” — here’s a capital suggestion for the next time you visit: a pastry tour. Yes, do do the Beethoven tour, the Empress Maria Theresia tour and the operetta tour. Mucho fun! But why not add a “tour” of your very own and call it the Vienna pastry tour. If calories are your no-no, you can make the tour short, but if calories don’t count, then you can stretch it from here to eat-emity! What’s nice is that you can start your Vienna pastry tour almost anywhere. But why not follow this suggested route, which works for friends who visit me and come waltzing back on Cream Puff Cloud Seven-Eleven. Give or take 500 caloric units, it goes like this: you start your tour on foot, midmorning, as a kind of second breakfast (or “Gabel Fruhstuck,” as the Viennese call it) by plunging into the Aida Cafe which is diagonally across the street from the opera house, the centre of downtown Vienna.

The Aida company runs a small string of quickservice, “Konditorei" coffee houses which bases its success on an extremely high-quality level of pas-try-making that locals maintain is the best around, although the range of different pastries is small. With a “cuppa” you can sip either standing at the counter or seated at one of the tiny tables, take your pick of either a square cheesefilled bun (“Topfengolatsche”) or a raisin-and-nut bun that goes round and round like the back of a snail (hence the name “Schnecke”) or a prune-jam-filled rectangle of leaf-thin layers of crust called “Powidltascherl.” You couldn’t find a better introduction to Vienna’s famous pastries. From the Aida it’s about a ten-minute walk to Demel’s Cafe at Number 14 Kohlmarkt, now a pedestrian zone. This hun-dred-year-old emporium of gastronomic “Gemutlichkeit” could never disappoint the palate, but its prices could easily wallop the wallet. In Demel’s you don’t count money or calories. You enjoy. You enjoy the elegant, mirrored walls and the half-dollar-sized marbletop tables; you enjoy its old-fashioned dainty service; and you enjoy its astounding selection of pastries not to be seen anywhere else. Demel’s combines quantity with quality with a capital Q. By the time you’re finished at Demel’s-or Demel’s has finished you-

you’ll be staggering a bit. Don’t give up at this point. Keep pushing. Now it’s “Forward March,” towards your next target, the Inter-Continental Hotel at Johannesgasse 28, next to Vienna’s biggest outdoor skating rink which flanks the historic Concert House. Here you can indulge in the justly famdus apple strudel which is Vienna’s middle name. Your gastro-host is the multi-prize-winning chief pastry cook, Johann Ehrenreiter, who believes a successful strudel dough should be so thin that you could read a newspaper through it. When you move into Herr Ehrenreiter’s web, take my suggestion and deviate from your pastry orgy this one single time and order a cake that is totally Viennese, invented for the benefit of humanity. Called “Mohr in Hemd” (moor in a shirt), it is a seductive steamed chocolate sponge cake inundated with hot chocolate sauce and a sidebar mound of unsweetened whipped cream (“Schlagobers” in Austrian dialect). This is a mminmmarvelous interlude before you hie off to your next and final yummy destination. Proceed to Franz Zimmer’s Schubert-Stu-berl Restaurant, located at Number 4 Schreyvogelgasse, and pay a call on the pastry king himself. Franz Zimmer is the famous baker who wrote the best book on the subject yet, “The Art of Viennese Pastry,” and he is the same white-hatted chef who presents Austrian

T.V.’s cooking show, besides running the only private cookery school in the country. His restaurant is an ancient, rambling house, with a half-dozen intimate dining rooms (the “newest” of which is only 300 years old) all with candlelit table settings. Apart from the fact that you can eat a sumptuous full-course meal at the Schubert-Stuberl, remember you’re on a pastry tour. Rather than order one of the uppercrust’s magic pastries, why not place yourself in “Professor” Zimmer’s hands and let him suggest something to complement your coffee or tea.

About your pastry fling, you need never feel guilty because just being in Vienna is a legitimate excuse to eat — which you can do with a clear conscience here since that’s what everybody does all the time. In your case, according to my calculations, you will have sampled 13 different items, an even Baker’s Dozen. So in Vienna that is your lucky number.