N.N.-D.
CHAPTER XI
AUSTRIA AND HUNGARY
Viennese restaurants and cafés—Baden—Carlsbad—Marienbad—Prague—Bad Gastein—Budapesth.
Vienna
The cuisine of the best of the Viennese restaurants, those attached to the big hotels, is French, though the Wiener Rostbraten and the Wiener Schnitzel are world-famous, and the typical Viennese dinner is a good French dinner with the addition of very delicious bread and pastry made with a lighter hand than any Gallic cook brings to his task. The wines of the country of Retz, Mailberg, Pfaffstadt, Gumpoldskirchen, Klosterneuberg, Nussberg, and Vöslau should all be tasted, most of them being more than drinkable. Beer, however, is the real Viennese drink, and the very light liquid, ice cold, is a delightful beverage.
"Stay at what hotel you please, but dine at the Bristol," was the advice given me nigh a score of years ago when I first visited Vienna, and it holds good now; indeed of late the "smart set" of Vienna has taken it greatly into favour, and dines or sups there—the opera and plays begin at 7 and end at 10—constantly. The prices, à la carte, are high, but the cooking is good. Some specialities of the house are trout taken alive from the aquarium, Huitres Titania, Homard Cardinal, Poularde Wladimir, Soufflé King Edward VII., Oranges à l'Infante.
Sacher's, in the hotel of that name just behind the Opera House, is very well known and may be taken as the typical Viennese restaurant. It is expensive, as indeed all the best Viennese restaurants are. It is not quite so exclusively French in its cuisine as some of the other good restaurants, and one of its plats de jour is always a national dish, as often as not a Hungarian one, so that by dining or breakfasting at Sacher's one obtains some idea of what the real cookery of the dual monarchy is like. Sacher's has a branch establishment in the Prater, which is always in high favour with the Viennese.