Explore Sarajevo / Hidden Gems / Viennese Café
Hidden Gem · Centar · 3 min read
Viennese Café
The preserved Habsburg-era café on the ground floor of Hotel Europe — Vienna at street level in the centre of Sarajevo, since 1882.
- Established
- 1882
- By
- Karl Pařík (Hotel Europe building)
Address
Vladislava Skarića 5, Sarajevo 71000 (ground floor of Hotel Europe)
Hours
Typically 08:00–23:00; verify with the hotel
Price
Coffee 4–7 BAM; cake 8–12 BAM
Getting there
Tram 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 to Latinska ćuprija or Cumurija; one-minute walk to the hotel
Time needed
An hour, longer if you order cake
Best time
Mid-morning, when the breakfast crowd has gone and the room is quiet
Coordinates
43.8586° N 18.4273° E
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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 unmistakably Vienna by way of Sarajevo — wood-panelled walls, mirrored bar, marble-topped tables, brass fittings, deep upholstered seating, a high ceiling, and a particular hush that is part of the coffeehouse tradition the room is trying to honour. Newspapers on wooden frames. A piano on the corner. Waiters in waistcoats.
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 point of the Viennese Café is the Vienna coffee menu, which is significantly broader than the Bosnian or Italian coffee vocabularies you’ll meet elsewhere in Sarajevo. The standards:
- Melange — espresso with steamed milk and a foam cap. The Viennese cousin of a cappuccino.
- Einspänner — a double espresso under a tall whipped-cream crown, served in a glass.
- Kapuziner — a darker, smaller cappuccino with whipped cream rather than milk foam.
- Wiener Mokka — a strong black coffee, served with a glass of water.
- Pharisäer — coffee with rum and whipped cream. End-of-meal.
For something to eat, the room makes its own Apfelstrudel and Sachertorte, both in the proper Vienna register. The strudel is the local favourite and is excellent. The Sachertorte is honest.
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.
The view through the café windows is onto a Habsburg-era street that has hardly changed since 1900. Across the road, the buildings are the same. The trams go by. A waiter in a waistcoat brings your melange on a small silver tray with a glass of water and a wrapped sugar cube. For sixty minutes 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.
Sources & further reading
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Ph: Mark Chorlton · CC BY-SA 2.0
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