Hofbackstube Schoenbrunn

Below Café Residenz, in the stone vaults of Schönbrunn Palace's Kavalierstrakt, sits the Hofbackstube — a working bakery that once fed the Habsburgs' castle guards. The Querfeld family took over the space in 1998, two years after Schönbrunn's UNESCO World Heritage listing, and turned the old "Polizeiküche" into a Viennese coffeehouse with the bakery preserved as its centerpiece.

The Querfelds are no newcomers to Vienna's coffeehouse culture: they have also run Café Landtmann, open since 1873, one of the grand cafés whose tradition UNESCO recognized as intangible cultural heritage in 2011. That same attention to craft carries into the Hofbackstube, where a Schaubackstube (show bakery) runs an apple strudel demonstration every hour on the hour — a twenty-minute performance ending with a strudel tasting and a printed copy of the "Original Viennese Apple Strudel Recipe" for every visitor to take home.

Upstairs, the café's kitchen serves Kaiser Franz Joseph's reported favorite dish, Tafelspitz, alongside a homemade Sachertorte, in a dining room of period banquettes, seating loges and chandeliers with a terrace overlooking the palace grounds. Note: the store's registry official_url resolves to an unrelated Austrian custom-cake maker; the verified entity here is Café Residenz's Hofbackstube at Schönbrunn Palace.