Café Hawelka

Located on a quiet side street near the Stephansdom, the dark, smoky, wood-paneled Hawelka is one of the city’s most famous intellectual cafés, frequented during its heyday in the 1960s and ’70s by actors, artists, poets and songwriters. As other Viennese Kaffeehäuser have renovated to appeal to a more contemporary sensibility, the Hawelka, opened by Leopold Hawelka and his wife Josefine in 1939, has held on to its well-worn patina, with faded red-and-yellow-striped couches, marble-topped tables and cozy nooks where you can sit for hours—if you can handle the nicotine-stained atmosphere. The Buchteln (dough dumplings filled with jam) are legendary.