The food festival in Vienna is a very interesting event. Nowhere in Austria can one find so many producers of local food from all our nine provinces.
My Canadian friends Fay and Robert met me in front of the Stadtpark in pouring rain. Saturday was not the best of days for an outdoor festival. Nevertheless we decided to make the best of it since it was their last day in Vienna. The flowers were in full bloom, and their smell was fighting with the aromas of cheese and grilled sausages.
We walked around the park, trying to sample everthing that was on display. Robert tried lots of different goat cheese, Fay was looking more into ham and sausages while I bought an award-winning blood sausage, brawn in aspic jelly from a wild boar, Kriecherl juice (sorry, can’t find an English translation but it is like a yellow plum), a nut-tomato pesto and a strawberry “jam” named ‘Mieze Schindler’ (the strawberry, not the jam) from Erich Stekovics. Everything looked delicious, in the end I was glad I didn’t bring more cash!
When we passed these sweets
Robert decided it was time to take a break. By then it was mid-afternoon, time for a little glass of wine on this rainy day!
After the small snack we needed a coffee and it was decided to go for coffee at the Café Sacher. Fay and Robert have tried to go there all week but turned around when they saw the line ups. I am aware that I am using plural here, but at the Sacher there is not only a Café, but also three other venues where you can spend your money (Sacher um’s Eck, Sacher restaurant, Sacher Stub’n). All four had a line-up of course, so we settled on the one in front of the café.
Yours truly waiting in line for coffee, heaven help me!
In the end we made it inside and to be honest the wait was not so long. Having coffee at the Sacher is not like your usual coffee experience in any of the other coffee houses in Vienna. No, not at all. Here you wait to be seated, the moment you sit the waiter comes, asks for your order, your cake is served within a minute, coffee within five minutes and with the coffee arrives your bill. You really feel “welcome” here. Why the tourists are coming in droves is not clear to me, but I give the Sacher that: The cake is delicious!
My cake was too good to wait for the picture to be taken. Fay seemed kind of skeptic because hers was disappearing very fast as well.
In the end they both looked happy and our waiter made time to take a picture of us. Excellent service at the Sacher!
Don’t think that this was all the food for the day. We met again at dinner time and went to the Gastwirtschaft Huth. They serve very good Viennese cuisine. Food and service were excellent and the meal was a memorable last dinner. Montreal is sadly not around the corner.
We said goodbye the next morning in front of their hotel. Fay and Robert, it was a pleasure having you here! I have never met anyone who took eating cake so serious! But you are right, it is serious business!
PS: I finished ‘A Feast for Crows
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Fantastic pictures!!! Food festival and friends… what is better than that! Yours truly looks adorable under that umbrella… and they look very happy!
Its such as you read my mind! You seem to understand a lot about this,
like you wrote the guide in it or something. I think that you just could do with a few % to drive
the message home a bit, however instead of that, that
is great blog. An excellent read. I’ll definitely be back.
I know that pink umbrella – from Ipanema beach, a multipurpose little thing
:-)