Adlerhof

Review

The king of the skies

Was everything good the way it used to be? Is everything that is new bad? Certainly not. Despite all the joy that the Adlerhof is open again and that the Burggassen-Anger now has a large, beautiful, professionally run, trendy restaurant that caters to many needs, there is also a bit of melancholy that the old Adlerhof no longer exists. That there are hardly any places like the old Adlerhof left. That pubs like the old Adlerhof can no longer exist today.
The Adlerhof - a Gründerzeit apartment block that stretches from Siebensterngasse to Burggasse and is connected by a passageway where roughly every second local music video was filmed in the 1980s - has probably always contained a pub that has always felt like it was run by Mr. Stefan Giczi. The front room was dedicated to watching soccer matches and drinking Schnaitl beer, while the rooms at the back were used to store old newspapers. In 2017, the Adlerhof was closed and vacated after Mr. Stefan's long illness. And stood empty for three years. Now it's open again, and everything is different than before: The operators of the two Wirr restaurants, Andreas Knünz and Manuel Köpf, dug deep into the investment pot and turned the front room into a kind of "New Adlerhof" with a reconstruction of the old lambris, old neon lamps, a beautifully renovated bar (which now serves Schleppe beer), replicas of the legendary old Adlerhof wallpaper and remarkably beautiful floor tiling, it looks great; in the middle section there's a winter garden with a skylight, a wrought-iron spiral staircase from willhaben.at and Otto Wagner banisters, lots of indoor plants and wall design copied from Laudon Castle by designer Laura Karasinski; and at the back there's a "salon" with Thonet armchairs and tables for which old Oswald Haerdtl table legs were found. There is a state-of-the-art kitchen and a consistent Adlerhof CI from the staff T-shirts to the beer mats and packaging paper. The display case in the bar also serves as a greisslerei, where you can buy bread (and the best Wachauerlaberln in the country) from the Schmidl bakery.
The kitchen also goes full throttle, with an endless supply of hipster breakfasts, no dish is spared from creative input, such as ceviche of sea bream with ginger confit and sweet croutons (€ 10), Chioggia beetroot carpaccio with roasted walnuts, a rillette of goose aka "Verhackerts" with onion chutney (€ 9), chorizo corn-fed chicken and the unmissable deep-fried pulpo with saffron aioli and fennel (€ 17). All wonderful. But perhaps a little less would have been enough.
To sum up: the Adlerhof has been transformed from a gloomy footballers' asylum into a dazzling hipster restaurant with an all-round offer.

Adlerhof 7th, Burggasse 51/6, tel. 01/522 49 05, daily 6.30am-2pm, www.adlerhof.wien

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