Café Hawelka
Café Hawelka is a traditional Viennese café on Dorotheergasse, in the Innere Stadt, the first district of Vienna. It matters because for decades it was a gathering place for writers and artists, and it has kept the character of a classic Viennese coffee house.
History
Leopold Hawelka opened the café in 1939. Earlier, from 1936, he had run the Kaffee Alt Wien on Bäckerstraße, and in May 1939 he and his wife Josefine took over the Café Ludwig on Dorotheergasse, a site that had housed the Chatham Bar since 1906. The outbreak of the Second World War forced its closure, and it reopened in autumn 1945 in a building that had survived almost intact.
After the occupation ended in 1955, the café quickly became a meeting point for writers and critics such as Heimito von Doderer and Hilde Spiel. After the Café Herrenhof closed in 1961, even more artists came, and the café became a central meeting place for the art scene of the time. Its peak came in the sixties and seventies. After Leopold's death in 2011, his son Günter ran the café until his own death in 2021.
Culture
Hawelka embodies the Viennese coffee house tradition as a place to talk, read and work at an unhurried pace. Its specialty is the Buchteln, sweet yeast buns whose traditional recipe is still followed. Josefine Hawelka ran the café with her husband for sixty-six years, until her death in 2005. Today the third generation, Amir and Michael Hawelka, runs it and also oversees the family's coffee roastery. For years Leopold greeted guests at the door, and the café remains a regular stop for visitors interested in Vienna's literary and artistic life.
Legend and fact
For two decades it was wrongly believed that the earlier venue was called the Je t'aime-Bar. The more reliable sources indicate that the documented name was the Chatham Bar, opened in 1906.