Zach Selch describes his years at Prückl, a Vienna coffee house where black coffee arrives with soda water, pastry, and fresh water each hour. Coffee reached the West 500 years ago through Turkish-Vietnamese trade routes. Vienna takes it more seriously than the commercialized versions in America and Italy.
Chapters
I'm in Vienna in a coffee shop called Prückl. It's off the Opera Circle. And there are lots of other coffee shops in Vienna, but this is the one I've been coming to for about 30 years. And back in the end of the Cold War, I really lobbied hard to try and live here because, boy, this is a place I could live. And one of the reasons I wanted to live here was because of this coffee shop. The way our A lot of people know how to drink coffee. You can get good coffee now in America, and you can get good coffee in Italy, great coffee in Italy. But boy, the Viennese know how to drink coffee, and they know how to live around the coffee culture. And and you might notice they brought me brought me my coffee just now, and it's coffee with a little glass of soda water. And I'm having a piece of pastry which is homemade here, and you can sit here pretty much as long as you want. They'll keep bringing out a they'll keep bringing out a glass of water every hour about an hour. That you've been here. Fantastic coffee. This is really where coffee culture was invented in the West. The coffee that we're drinking in Italy, the espresso, really comes— pretty much everybody in the West who drinks coffee got it from the Vietnamese, who got it from the Turks close to 500 years ago. And the coffee they're drinking here is spectacular. They take it very seriously, especially in the old-school coffee shops. This place was founded before World War I, and virtually nothing has changed. I would be surprised if the newspaper frames that they're using are still the original that they bought 100 years ago, right? They're certainly the same as they were using back during the time of the Cold War. So I'm really enjoying myself. I'm having to be here. When you get to Vienna or when you get to Austria, you have to try the coffee. Now, of course, they have all sorts of other, you know, coffee drinks like Americans like, although no, no, I don't want to say that. It's not like pumpkin spice stuff. All sorts of creamy stuff that's been developed over the years. You can get coffee with cream and so on. I just like the black coffee. And we're starting to see this in the West Certainly in Chicago, there are a couple of coffee shops that have this. When you decide it's time to grow your international sales, call us.
