Café Engländer Praterstern

Review

Coffee house is everywhere

Let's talk about Café Engländer: it's the closest thing to what writers, philosophers and bohemians - male and female - of the golden coffee house era would call an appealing place. This is where people met, both privately and on business, both planned and by chance. Here you can enjoy a first-class meal, read the newspaper, get drunk and, yes, the coffee is good too - even though Café Engländer is nowhere near as old as the classic coffee house icons. In fact, it has only existed for 33 years, and not even continuously. After Christian Wukonigg and Attila Corbaci turned the Windhag pensioners' café into the elegant, avant-garde Engländer in 1990, they embarked on the Brasserie Engländer project five years later. A gourmet restaurant with furniture designed by the then current elite of contemporary art in the picturesque salesroom of the Habig imperial and royal hat factory. Probably the most beautiful restaurant in the city went down in flames and dragged Café Engländer into the abyss with it. For a few years, a pizzeria even moved into the artists' café. Then the amazing thing happened: Christian Wukonigg got the Engländer back together with Wolfgang Jelinek in 2002. It's hard to imagine that it didn't exist once, and now it even exists twice, in a way. Because Wukonigg took over Pure am Praterstern, a vegan designer restaurant that opened more than a year late, about a year ago, and which everyone actually said would not work out. Unfortunately, they were all right about that: The building with the outline of a five-petaled flower housed the Praterstern police station until a few years ago. Wukonigg says that the kitchen is actually unsuitable for his needs and the bar/counter in the middle of the Stern building is difficult to run. But he thinks the space is great, the "center of the The illustrious English audience will perhaps come in less, why should they, as they have the original. But even if the Engländer Praterstern looks just like the flopped Pure, there's an Engländer menu to eat and drink: fried chicken salad, beef marinated in seed oil, goulash, schnitzel and a very good toast. The prices are okay, a bright, reliable café-restaurant is in the city center goes Praterstern. What the veggie concept failed to achieve a year ago, Vienna's best artist café is now attempting.

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