Three Centuries of Coffee-House History: Café Tomaselli on the Alter Markt
Café Tomaselli traces its story back to 1700, the year a Frenchman named Johann Fontaine received permission to open Salzburg's first coffee tap. The facade still reads 1703, the date long assumed to be the start, until the historian Gerhard Ammerer dug into the archives in 2003 and pushed the founding back three more years. Either way, no other working coffee house in Austria can claim a longer run.
In its early days it wasn't much of a café at all, more a meeting spot for students over in the Goldgasse. Anton Staiger took over the coffee vault in 1753, then moved the business to its current address on the Alter Markt in 1764, where it became known as Café Staiger. Mozart would have known it as the Staiger, and he is said to have been a frequent guest. The almond milk associated with Mozart is still on the menu today, a small continuity that keeps the place feeling lived-in.
The name everyone uses now arrived in 1852, when the confectioner Carl Tomaselli bought the house. His father was the Milanese tenor Giuseppe Tomaselli, so there was opera in the family before there was coffee. Carl expanded the offering, added ice cream, and set up the little Tomaselli-Kiosk across the square in 1859/60, still a summer fixture under the chestnut trees. Within a few decades the café had grown into the social engine of the old town, with newspapers from across Europe laid out for guests who came to read as much as to drink.
Step inside Café Tomaselli and the room does much of the talking: glossy walnut panels inlaid with oriental patterns, crystal chandeliers, a stuccoed ceiling and tall mirrors that give the main salon the feel of a very grand living room. The marble tables, the silver trays and the waiters in dinner jackets all belong to the same unbroken style. Today the first-floor veranda is the seat everyone wants, looking straight down over the Alter Markt and the carriages crossing it.
Café Tomaselli has gathered its share of stories along the way. Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Max Reinhardt are said to have sketched out the idea for the Salzburg Festival at one of these tables. After the Second World War the Americans requisitioned the rooms and ran them for a few years as a coffee shop called Forty Second Street, before the house came back to the family in 1950.
The Tomaselli family has owned the café since 1852, and the look of the place has barely changed in that time. The paneling, the marble tables, the mirrors and the newspaper racks are all still where you would expect them at Café Tomaselli.
