Viennese cafés in Czech Prague

Vienna’s café culture has been recognised as such an important phenomenon that it was included on the UNESCO World Intangible Heritage List in 2011. However, marble tables, Thonet chairs, discreet boxes or newspapers in bentwood holders are also typical of Prague’s café culture. After all, the Czech lands were part of the Habsburg monarchy for three hundred years and both Austrian and Czech culture have long influenced each other. Whether you like the lively café glamour or a quieter sitting with a cup over a book, you’ll find it in Prague.

Prague is a metropolis with an advanced coffee culture. You’ll find establishments that have elevated coffee making to an art form of its own, small cafes with wooden chairs on the sidewalk, sober cafes in arcades where locals stop on their way home from work, fair trade cafes and hipster and bohemian coffee shops. In short, everything that belongs to the contemporary café culture of Europe.

But besides that, Prague has also retained those Viennese-style cafés, where waiters move around in suits with their left hands behind their backs, newspapers in five languages hang on hangers in rattan frames, and desserts are made by a pastry chef who has won three medals at world competitions. The axis of this world of refined taste and unobtrusive refinement in Prague is primarily Národní třída – here the most renowned Prague cafés of Viennese style are concentrated.

Probably the most famous was the café located on the first floor of the now defunct Brauner House on the corner of Národní and Na Perštýně Streets. It is documented as early as 1820, when it referred to the Austrian tradition directly by its name – Vienna Café. Later it was renamed Union and under this name it also entered Czech cultural history. An advertisement from 1892 testifies to its place in Prague’s social life:

In the late 19th and early 20th century there was no one who meant anything in the social life of Prague and you wouldn’t meet him in the Unionka in the evening.

However, Unionka’s fame finally faded in the early 1940s. Its memory remains in the form of several large-scale photographs that can be admired in the neo-Renaissance house on the opposite side of Národní Avenue, which has been home to the Café Louvre since 1902. This café was also one of the meccas of Prague’s café culture in the first half of the 20th century. It included several floors, two billiard halls with eleven tables, games rooms, club rooms, a writing room and a telephone exchange. A salon orchestra played for guests, and there was a cinema, a night bar and a wine cellar. Jan Zrzavý, Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka and Albert Einstein were guests here. Nowadays, such a place would probably be called a “creative hub” or a “cultural centre”.

After the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1948, the café was closed down, but shortly after the Velvet Revolution the premises were renovated and the legendary café was reopened. It is currently located on the first floor and, in addition to the regular café operations, also includes a billiards room. If you want to experience true interwar refinement in Prague, you should not miss a visit to Café Louvre. Here you can have a Sacher cake or a typical Viennese apple strudel; the coffee menu includes not only the expected “Viennese” but also “Marie Therese” coffee.

On the same street, just about two hundred metres towards the Vltava River, we find another of Prague’s iconic establishments – the National Café. It has undergone an interesting identity evolution. It was founded in 1896 as Café Imperial and was truly imperial. A picture of a potentate hung on the wall, and officers of the Tsar’s army used to come here for billiards, while Antonín Dvořák, the most famous Czech composer, read a newspaper carefully in the corner. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Café Imperial became the National Café, the Austrian officers were replaced by Czech artists, and if there was one thing that was not followed, it was the Austro-Hungarian, and therefore Viennese, café tradition. The left-wing art association Devětsil and avant-garde architects met here.

And like the Café Louvre, the National Café did not survive the communist coup in 1948 and, like the Café Louvre, was rebuilt after 1989. Today, there are bentwood chairs around round marble tables and crystal chandeliers with trimmings hanging from the ceilings. Viennese coffee and Austrian Grüner Veltliner are on offer. After years of national, social and class defiance, Viennese refinement has returned to the National Café.

At the very end of the street, with the entrance facing Národní třída and the view of the Vltava River, over which the iconic panorama of Hradčany rises, we find the Slavia café. Opened in 1882, it is the oldest café on Národní třída, the axis around which the planet of Prague’s café culture revolves. It is and always has been a place where you could meet leading Czech actors coming here from the opposite National Theatre, but also writers, artists or architects.

However, unlike its competitors, the National Café and Café Louvre, it was not closed after the communist coup in 1948, but operated as a nationalized enterprise even during the strange years of totalitarianism. It thus had the opportunity to host personalities such as Gabriel García Márquez and Miloš Forman. Paradoxically, dissident intellectuals also met in this showcase of the nationalized café after the occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968: Václav Havel, Josef Škvorecký, Bohumil Hrabal and others. Today, it is once again a classy establishment with rounded tables and chairs made of bent wood, on whose red treads discreet waiters and waitresses move inaudibly. Slavia thus once again spreads not only the glory of the Czech artistic and intellectual representation of three centuries, but also the legacy of Viennese café culture. Other Prague establishments of a similar nature certainly include Obecní dům, Café Imperial or Grand Café Orient. Here, too, you will return to a world that we may sometimes miss a little with today’s frantic rush and practicality.