Café Bellaria

Review

Young again after 151 years

Café Bellaria was almost a Ringstrasse café. Just 70 meters separate it from the Ring, although that wouldn't have made much difference, as it is a car racing track and streetcar junction, hardly a sensual location for a charismatic coffee house.
And so Café Bellaria - incidentally the oldest coffee house in Vienna, founded in 1870 - developed into a somewhat quirky place away from all the attention, where regulars celebrated Franz Antel regulars' tables and weekly opera evenings. Last year, however, it wasn't just the Bellaria cinema that closed, but also the café, which immediately aroused the interest of American hamburger chains because the location is already awesome.
Rubin Okotie - a former member of the Austrian national soccer team and operator of one of the first bowl restaurants in Vienna two years ago - also likes to have breakfast in David Figar's bistro in Kirchengasse and is always on the lookout for interesting catering establishments. So the two of them took a look at the café and knew immediately that this was what they wanted to do.
Another colorful hipster place that also boasts a historical attitude? Please don't!
But it turned out really well: the atmosphere of the café was not only preserved, but was also worked out very well by KLK (Mochi, The Krypt, Urbanauts). The impressive stucco dome and the arched windows were given a symbiotic contrast with a cast floor, a neon snake, bright red Thonet armchairs and, above all, wall cladding made of gray slate slats.
Sure, burgers and bowls are a must. However, the breakfast menu is really not from bad parents and clearly beats the nearby Museumsquartier eateries. For the sake of former regulars, there's also schnitzel, goulash and roast onion, and the kitchen also shows real courage to be original: Chicory salad with gorgonzola marinade, roasted nuts and grapes was once something really different and really good (€ 11), roast duck breast is also rare, but thanks to modern sous-vide cooking, the previously tough muscle is tender as butter, the gnocchi are fluffy, the sour cherry and port wine jus perhaps a little too much of a good thing, just the roast salad hearts would be enough (€ 23).
And very important: from 5 pm, the café also becomes a bar, where Fabian Kalal mixes exceptionally good cocktails from exceptional ingredients: he adds nut butter to the Campari for the very good Negroni, for example, which gives it a bit more body. Awesome.
Summary:
A newly opened coffee house that turned out much better than expected, where you can eat well and get drunk.

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