Sarajevo Viennese Café

The Viennese Café at Hotel Europe is one of the few places in Sarajevo where the Austro-Hungarian period is still operating on its own terms, in its original room, with its original menu vocabulary, in a building that has done little to disguise the fact that it used to belong to Vienna.

Hotel Europe itself was the first European-style hotel built in Ottoman Sarajevo. It opened in 1882, four years after Austria-Hungary took administrative control of the city. The building was designed by Karl Pařík, the Czech architect responsible for many of Sarajevo’s defining Habsburg-era buildings, including the Vijećnica, and was for decades the diplomatic and social heart of the new Habsburg quarter. The café on the ground floor opened with the hotel and has functioned more or less continuously since.

What the room is

The Viennese Café occupies the ground-floor street-corner room of Hotel Europe, facing onto Vladislava Skarića. It is Vienna by way of Sarajevo. A long dark-wood bar stands on a black-and-white chequered floor. Crystal chandeliers hang from painted, stencilled ceiling panels. The tables are polished wood, the chairs are upholstered in navy or patterned fabric, and a blue carpet woven with fleur-de-lis runs through to a lounge corner of armchairs. In the back room a mural of an old city street fills an arched niche, and a corridor of gilt-framed paintings leads further into the hotel.

It is not theatre. It is a working café that has kept a particular aesthetic going for one hundred and forty years.

What to order

The coffee list is shorter and less Viennese than the room suggests. Per the hotel’s published drinks list (checked October 2026), the standards are a Lavazza espresso at 3.50 BAM, Bosnian coffee at 5 BAM and cappuccino at 5 BAM. The Vienna corner of the menu is two drinks:

• Bečka kafa (Viennese coffee): coffee with cream, chocolate and cinnamon. 6 BAM.
• Bečki cappuccino (Viennese cappuccino): cappuccino with cream and chocolate. 6 BAM.

Then there is Mozart kafa at 8 BAM, with Mozart chocolate liqueur, and a run of spiked coffees (Irish, Italian, Bailey’s) at 10–12 BAM. The cakes come from the hotel group’s own Mozzart patisserie (Hotel Europe Group). Prices change; the list on the table is the one that counts.

How to use it

This is not a casual sit. The room expects a certain pace and a certain tone. Reservations are not necessary; walking in is fine. Dress should be tidy, jeans are acceptable, beachwear is not. Allow at least an hour. Bring a book, or a notebook, or a quiet companion.

Ask for the window table if it is free. It sits in a tall arched window with heavy fringed curtains drawn back, and it looks straight out onto the street. Order a Bečka kafa, open the book, and for an hour you are in the part of Sarajevo that still belongs to Vienna.

The café is small, central, easy to find, and, in the way these rooms always are, a quietly perfect refuge from whichever part of the city you have come from.