Stephansdom and Cafe Landtmann on Day One in Vienna
The goal on the first day in Vienna was for the three of us – Therese and I and our friend Faith who came with us to Vienna – to get to the Stephansdom (or if you prefer, St. Stephen’s Church). That would turn out to be a much more easily-achieved goal than I imagined it would be in one sense, but an unexpectedly elusive goal in another.
You see, Vienna’s most famous monument was not as far from our hotel as it looked on paper. So after arriving in Vienna on our overnight flight from New York City and taxi-ing to the Hilton Vienna Plaza where we dropped off our bags, it was an easy walk down Wipplingerstrasse to the Stephansplatz, the grand square surrounding the church. Even with temporary detours to the Maria am Gestade Church (in the middle of a mass – we would have to come back to that one) and the Ankeruhr in the Hoher Markt (beautiful but broken at that point), we made it to the church in probably half an hour. That was the easy part of our goal.
The hard part was actually getting to see the church. Because it was Sunday – did I mention that we arrived on a Sunday morning. Yep, we did. Which meant that we could see St. Stephen’s exterior just fine, but with high mass underway inside, we and hundreds of other similarly clueless tourists were herded in the back of the church far from the action. We could hear, and with Franz Josef Haydn’s Lord Nelson Mass serving as the musical portion of the mass, what there was to hear was gorgeous. But we couldn’t see much. And the signs told us that we wouldn’t be allowed to get closer for another hour-plus.
Time to head to plan B.
In this case, the first part of plan B was to go back to where we had just come, Hoher Markt.
Wedding Fountain in Hoher Markt
I was holding an ace, you see, that I would play when other plans fell through – Hoher Markt’s Romermuseum. Like most European cities, Vienna was first a Roman settlement (called Vindobona). But while some cities have their Roman ruins outside of town (Budapest, for example), Vienna’s is underneath the modern city – how cool is that? And so in the Hoher Markt Romermuseum are Roman-era houses that have been unearthed below street level.
We spent a while taking in Vienna’s ancient underpinnings. I loved that this museum has a lot of things designed for children. For example, they have a couple of copies of bas relief sculptures made out of plaster that invite touching.
Another thing I should tell you about Vienna when we were there – it was insanely hot. Every day was in the upper 90s, and some days it was hotter than that. As we emerged from the museum into the sweltering heat, with still some time to kill before we could tour St. Stephen’s, I thought a cold drink was a good idea. And I knew about the Wollzeile, a street full of cafes, so I steered us in that direction.
After walking a couple of blocks, we came across Cafe Diglas. There were a couple of tables on the side street off of Wollzeile that had shade, not a small consideration on such a hot day. We sat there and ordered cold drinks – Therese and Faith had house-made lemonade, and I drank a cold Coca Cola. I noticed that right across the way from us was a store with a cool vintage sign (maybe from the 1960s?).
The Sight From Our Seat at Cafe Diglas
By that time it was getting close enough to the time for the church to be open to tourists that we wandered back there and found a seat in some benches in the back of the church and just waited. There was another service going on at that point, but it was pretty sedate compared to the Haydn-accented mass we had witnessed earlier. And so, with the fatigue of the hot day and our long travel with little sleep making itself felt, Therese and I dozed off.
We were awakened a while later by the murmur of happy tourists, which we knew must mean it was time to tour the church. It was. We joined the throng, slipped through the gate, and entered the middle of a truly glorious space.
After finally getting the full taste of the Stephansdom’s interior, we headed to our pre-picked lunch destination: the nearby Do & Co’s Onyx Bar. Therese had eaten lunch there many years earlier when she last visited Vienna, and loved how the bar, with its huge windows, faced directly onto the Stephansplatz and the church.
I was surprised to see that this bar/restaurant was not packed. After all, it was lunchtime on an incredibly hot day, and for a European venue, this had pretty decent air conditioning (you should know, if you don’t already, that public transportation, public spaces and even restaurants in Europe rarely have the kind of air conditioning we are used to encountering in the United States). And it had the incredible view. But it was less than half full, which meant we could pick a table right in the middle of the room with an excellent view of the windows and the church. I ordered a frankfurter with dipping sauces (ketchup, mustard and horseradish) and another Coke (I know, bad) for my lunch.
When we first sat down to lunch, the sun was shining a bit in the direction of the bar, and so they had their huge shades down a bit, cutting off the incredible view. But since the sun was moving away from the window, and the room therefore was feeling quite cool, Therese was able to convince them to raise the shades so we could see the church better. And this is what we saw.
Stephansdom Spire from the Onyx Bar
In other words, fabulous. In other words, just the kind of view that capped off the afternoon perfectly. Therese always says that when we travel to Europe, it is good to be out in the sun for at least four hours to reset our inner clocks before giving in to our jetlag and taking a long nap. We had been out for more than four hours, and thus had earned our nap. So we walked back to the Vienna Plaza Hilton and to our naps.
After a nap and freshening up, we met up and walked over to Cafe Landtmann to have some dinner.
Cafe Landtmann
Cafe Landtmann is a historic cafe right across from Vienna’s University, and thus, a short walk from our hotel. At Cafe Landtmann, I experienced for the first time Vienna’s system for identifying food allergies in their dishes. On the menu, there are typically a series of letters after the description of each dish, and each letter stands for an allergen. For example, A is for eggs. G is the letter that indicates that a dish has dairy in it. If you look closely at this menu, you will see that nearly all the menu items have that horrible G next to them!
But when I looked closer, I found two dishes that sounded really good to me: a chanterelle mushroom salad for my appetizer, and a mixed sausage dish for my main course.
Pretty neat, huh? On the one hand, yeah, it sucks that most of their menu items have dairy in them, but on the other hand, it is super (to me) to be able to identify which items are dairy free, so I don’t have to haggle with a waiter in my broken German and figure out what is safe for me. And I will tell you, nearly all the restaurants where we ate used this system! I wish the U.S. would adopt such a clear-cut system!
So I did order these two dishes, and I feasted well, my friends. I ordered the “half” mushroom salad, and that practically filled me up all by itself. Then I took my time with my sausages and pickles and other accompaniments, and enjoyed much of that too. All accompanied (of course) by some good Austrian beer.
Karl and Faith with Beers at Cafe Landtmann
That lovely dairy free dinner at Cafe Landtmann was a solid very enjoyable end to an extraordinary first day in Vienna.
The post Stephansdom and Cafe Landtmann on Day One in Vienna appeared first on The Dairy Free Traveler.