Café Sperl

A Ringstraße café that is still the same

Café Sperl was built in 1880 to plans by Gross and Jelinek, architects of the Ringstraße, and that same year the Sperl family took it over and gave it its name. It keeps its original interior: marble tables, bentwood Thonet chairs and three carom billiard tables where people still play. It was a meeting place for architects, musicians, actors and writers, and today it works as it always has: you order a coffee, take a newspaper from the pile and stay as long as you like.

What to order

Home-style Viennese cooking, with a fixed menu and another of the day with seasonal dishes, and pastries made daily on the premises. The house speciality is the Sperl cake: the recipe is secret, but it contains milk chocolate, vanilla, cinnamon and almond paste. It is also sold whole, in a little wooden box, in two sizes, to take away.

On Sundays from 15:30 there is live piano. In spring and summer they put tables out on the pavement.

With children

Next to the billiard tables there is a children's corner, which is unusual in a Viennese café of this kind.

Getting there

It is on the Gumpendorfer Straße, in the 6th district, five minutes' walk from the Naschmarkt and the Opera. Metro U2, Museumsquartier stop, or U1, U2 and U4 at Karlsplatz.