Sachertorte and the neighborhood cafe

This afternoon, having received some good word from the National Libraries too late to be able to visit them before they closed, I decided to hunker down and go over my list of requests and try to organize my thinking on the next two weeks of dissertation research. It was time well spent (found a lot of already-digitized material and confirmed the high-priority items I'll have to have scanned over the coming days), but it also gave me a chance to relax in a Viennese cafe (Cafe Goldegg, to be precise).

The saying is that the coffeehouse/cafe is the Viennese living room, and that's kind of what I found. Lots of people ordering a cup of coffee, maybe a pastry (or as the evening kicked in, maybe a cheap daily-menu meal and a beer) and chatting, reading the newspapers, or (like me) getting work done on their laptop. Though we laptop-workers are by far the minority, and frankly I doubt I'll do this again.

It also gave me a chance to try the obligatory sachertorte, the famous cake o' Vienna. If golf is a good walk spoiled, sachertorte might be thought of as a good chocolate cake spoiled. Specifically: it's chocolate cake with a thin layer of apricot jam. Because, as the old saying goes: "Who wants chocolate when you could have chocolate with apricots for some reason?" But because Chancellor Metternich liked it (ALMOST as much as he loved the police state and a vast network of domestic spies and dramatic censorship wait come back I'm gonna talk more about cakes) it was here to stay. The word on the street is that sachertorte really needs a heaping pile o' whipped cream (or as the Viennese charmingly call it, "Schlagobers," oof why).

What I'll say is: this was pretty damn tasty, although I didn't really love the apricot jam, which I guess means I don't really like sachertorte. But I loved Cafe Goldegg, so I'll most likely be back on odd afternoons and mornings to have a cup of coffee and try to translate the local papers. And I'll probably post about more cafes, because maybe it was inevitable that this blog would deteriorate into Things I Ate Abroad.

UPDATE: Immediately after I hit "post" on this, two Austrian men arrived with their own pool cues and started playing billiards. Vienna is magic, don't believe me when I try to convince you otherwise.