Café Hawelka, Vienna

Café Hawelka is the café you are looking at: an artists’ meeting place at Dorotheergasse 6 in Vienna’s Innere Stadt. Leopold Hawelka opened it in 1939, together with his wife Josefine, and the couple brought it back into operation in autumn 1945 after the wartime closure. The rooms retain an interior created by Rudolph Schindler, a pupil of Otto Wagner and Adolf Loos, and that design has remained unchanged since 1913.

From 1955 onward, writers and critics gathered here, and after the Herrenhof café closed in 1961, the Hawelka drew even more of Vienna’s artists. Its great period came during the 1960s and 1970s, when the café became a major meeting place for the city’s art scene. Guests included Heimito von Doderer, Friedrich Torberg, H.

C. Artmann, Friedensreich Hundertwasser, Elfriede Gerstl and Oskar Werner. Josefine Hawelka also made the café’s signature Buchteln, a baked sweet prepared from her Bohemian mother-in-law’s recipe.

After her death in 2005, the family continued the tradition. Leopold often welcomed guests at the entrance until his death in 2011, and his grandchildren Amir and Michael now carry on the café’s story.