The Great Sachertorte Debate, Vienna

18-22 August 2022
Hotel Sacher - sacher.com / Demel - demel.com / Cafe Central - cafecentral.wien

So, you thought you were going to be reading another set of reflections on another visit to another nice restaurant. A few photos, a tour through starters, mains and desserts. A comment on the staff, a sense of the atmosphere in the dining room, that kind of thing? Not today. Today we’re going on a journey that will take us across Europe, through 200 years of history, through palaces and court rooms and some of the world’s finest coffee houses. Our mission? To answer, via a process of painstaking research, a question that has plagued the human race for nigh on two centuries - or at least me for two decades. No expense will be spared. We will not stop for rest or reprieve. We will be steadfast and resolute in our pursuit of truth and enlightenment.

Sachertorte: Good or shit?

Somewhere at the root of all obsessions is a personal trauma, so I begin our story in a central London office in 2008. A fresh-faced, 21-year-old Sarah is sitting down to lunch in a staff canteen with her first set of real work colleagues in her first real job. The savoury bit of the meal is over, and she has just taken her first bite of a rich-looking, dark chocolate cake. Expecting succulent sponge and dense, fudgy icing, the interplay of sweet and bitter that is so wonderful in great chocolate cake, she stops mid chew, drops her fork and proclaims: “Urgh! What the fuck is that?!” To which one of her new colleagues responds, “Oh, yeah. Bloody Sachertorte’s as dry as dust.”

And he was absolutely right. Two cardboard-esque layers of chocolate sponge sandwiching a layer of apricot jam, encased in a layer of tough chocolate fondant. When you find yourself saying that the apricot jam is the best part of a chocolate cake, you know you’re in a bad place.

But I persevered. Over the years I tried different Sachertortes at different London bakeries and patisserie houses. I went to oh-so-fancy places in the West End. I went to eye-poppingly-hipster places in the East End. I walked from bus stops and tube stations and taxi ranks to obscure community vendors in the north and south. London is a global city with one of finest food scenes in the world. You can get good everything in London, from eel pie to Peruvian ceviche to Indonesian nasi goreng to South African bredie. But on every occasion, I found exactly the same thing. Dry, tasteless Sachertorte.

And it just didn’t make any sense. Sachertore is Austrian, and the Austrians make some of the best patisserie in the world. A whole subset of fancy baking - Viennoiserie - is named after their capital city. And the Austrians are seriously proud of Sachertorte. It’s their thing - when you talk about Viennoiserie, Sachertorte is the first thing people mention.

What the hell was going on? Could it be that dry and tastless was just what they were going for? Could it be that Sachertorte was something the Austrians held onto as a nostalgic remnant of a bygone culinary age, even though on a quality and enjoyment level it’s something that should have been confined to the dustbin when refrigeration became a thing, like pond pudding or collard greens?

Thirteen years of listening to me banging on about Sachertorte could only have been a contributing factor to Jane and me finding ourselves sitting at Manchester airport on an August morning waiting for a flight to Vienna. If the answers weren’t going to come to me, I was going to have to go and find them. I had my shortlist of coffee houses and hotels drawn up, my study partner at my side, and a week of research time in front of me. I was raring to get going.

Vienna and its coffee houses

Vienna is VERY grand. Centre of both the Austro-Hungarian and Holy Roman Empires, its baroque boulevards, palaces and theatres are jaw-droppingly magnificent. A lot of our first day in the city was spent wandering about saying “Wow” and “Oh my God, look at that!”

Vienna’s coffee houses are a central feature of city life. The first one opened in the late sixteen hundreds, and, according to legend, was formed after a group of Hapsburg soldiers found a bag of Turkish coffee beans left behind after the Ottoman Empire’s failed siege of Vienna in 1683. During the nineteenth century, they became synonymous with the European literary and political elite who would meet in them to debate and socialise. Often grand in structural design and staffed by waiters in tuxedos, you can sit and read international newspapers on sticks while enjoying great quality coffee and cake.

A word on the coffee: The classic Viennese coffee is a ‘melange’, which is similar to a cappuccino but with more milk foam. The coffee at each of the places we visited was spectacularly good. Jane, who doesn’t drink coffee, found the tea she ordered as an alternative to be average. So, yes, the clue is in the name… just order the coffee.

So, to a coffee house for our first piece of field research… No! To a hotel, obviously.

Hotel Sacher Wien, Philharmonikerstrasse

Our first stop felt like a dead cert. The sharp eyed will have spotted a clue in the name. Hotel Sacher styles itself as the home of The Original Sachertorte, but what does that actually mean? To get to the bottom of things, we’ll need to look back through the mists of time to the creation of the Sachertorte and what I’m going to call The Great Sacherschism…

It’s 1832 and Franz Sacher, an apprentice chef on the staff of Chancellor Metternich, is asked to invent a new cake. The Sachertorte is born and becomes extremely popular. So popular, in fact, that a number of establishments around Vienna start to create their own versions of it to sell. However, everyone knows that the bona fide, genuine article is made and sold at Hotel Sacher, which is owned and run by Franz’s son Eduard and his wife Anna, where the recipe is kept a closely guarded secret. Things go very well for several years until World War One strikes and the hotel is plunged into financial difficulty. It becomes clear that the Sacher family will not be able to carry on running the hotel, and Anna has an idea - she’ll maximise her retirement fund by selling the hotel and the recipe separately. The hotel is sold to a Mr Gurtler while the recipe is sold to Demel, famed coffee house and chocolatier. Anna then retires to her state of the art condo in Boca Raton and vows never to so much as look at a slice of Sachertorte ever again (okay, that bit might not be quite true… it might have been Guadeloupe rather than Florida).

Meanwhile, not all is sunshine and pina coladas at Hotel Sacher. Mr Gurtler quickly realises that a not insignificant portion of the value of his new purchase is tied up in the authenticity of the cake it sells, and it’s now well known about town that The Original Sachertorte is being sold half a mile away at Demel. So in 1934, Hotel Sacher and Demel end up facing one another across the courtroom where the rights to sell The Original Sachertorte are won by Hotel Sacher, even though the version they are selling does not follow the original recipe, rather an invention of their own chef.

Hence The Great Sacherschism, which is my term irrespective of what any Austrian court might say.

So Jane and I find ourselves outside Hotel Sacher for the (not-so-original) Original Sachertorte. And we find ourselves in quite a queue - evidently the absence of the original recipe has done little to put people off from paying the hotel a visit. We arrived at 6.30pm and waited for about an hour to be seated. And we earned our cake - the nice gentleman on the door informed us that we would be the last people admitted for the day and asked if we could let anybody arriving after us know that they would need to come back another time. To her credit, Jane put in an absolute shift to this degree, which we benefitted from later.

We were eventually shown through to the ostentatious ‘Cafe Sacher’ at 7.30pm, and I have to admit to being a bit grumpy. Waiting an hour in the street for what would be, no doubt, a rubbish bit of cake. What were we thinking? But the dining room was grand with vivid red paintwork and crystal chandeliers, and we ordered our cake and drinks and were served quickly.

The cake arrived with its traditional accompanyment of whipped cream, and a napkin to remind us that we were about to eat The Original Sachertorte. And you know what? It was… nice. Densely chocolately with a soft, rich icing and not one but two layers of apricot jam, it was even relatively moist (or perhaps “not dry” is a better descriptor - chocolate fudge cake it was not) and the cafe melange went down a treat. In addition, all Jane’s efforts in the queue meant that we ended up paying €25 for both of us rather than the eye-watering €25 per person that Hotel Sacher usually asks for a coffee and slice of Sachertorte.

We wandered out onto Philharmonikerstrasse afterwards, taking in the beautiful Austrian State Opera which is right opposite the hotel, and I was in something of a daze. Could it be that Sachertorte is actually edible? And not just edible but… good?

Demel, Kohlmarkt

After a day or so to regroup, we made our way to Demel for our second piece of field research. At the gateway of the supremely oppulent Hofburg Palace, Demel proudly presents itself as a ‘Hofzuckerbacker’, or a ‘Purveyor of the Imperial and Royal Court’, a title bestowed upon it by Kaiser Franz Joseph I in 1874. Demel is a very big deal in Vienna, and as we stood in the obligatory queue outside (a mere 20 minutes this time) we had high expectations. This, afterall, was the legitimate thing, made from Sacher’s original recipe by the Kaiser’s favourite chocolate and cake maker. This could only be great, right?

Wrong. Oh so wrong. Sporting a single layer of apricot jam and a much lighter in colour, milk chocolate icing, Demel’s Sachertorte was, without a doubt, the worst cake we would eat on our trip. I’m not saying its the worst Sachertorte I’ve ever eaten - there were some real horror shows in London - but even the generous dollop of whipped cream did little to save this. Fortunately we were having a bit of a cake fest and, as well as ordering a slice of Sachertorte to share, we also ordered a slice of Estherhazytorte, which is a Hungarian cake made with almond meringue and whipped cream, and a slice of Fachertorte, which is a central European-style cake with apple, walnut, plum and poppy seed. Both of those were delicious, and the interior at Demel, albeit very different to Hotel Sacher, was lovely in a very traditional way, and there was a wonderful in-house shop where you could buy cake and chocolates to take away.

So we knew that the cake at Demel was generally very good, and we knew from our experience at Hotel Sacher that Sachertorte could be good too. But the actual, bona fide recipe was… a dud? What was going on?!

Cafe Central, Herrengasse

We approached our third and final piece of field research unsure of what to think. Our project was nearing an end and we were no closer to finding an answer to our question. Was Sachertorte good, or was Sachertorte shit? We felt under pressure. We felt lost. We felt like we’d already eaten too much cake, even though Jane says you can never eat too much cake. Were we doomed to failure, or would Cafe Central be our salvation?

I was actually really excited to visit Cafe Central. With the reputation that Viennese coffee houses had for being a great percolator of political and literary ideas, no where got more politics-y or books-y than Cafe Central. Boasting Freud, Zweig, Lenin and Trotsky as former patrons (as well as Tito, Stalin and Hitler - murderous dictators need a coffee too, I guess) Cafe Central was a particularly important meeting spot in the years before World War One and in the interwar period. I did read a quote that I particularly liked, attributed to Victor Adler, founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, objecting to the view of the Austro-Hungarian foreign minister that war would lead to revolution in Russia: “And who will lead this revolution? Perhaps Mr. Bronstein sitting over there at the Cafe Central?”

Lev Bronstein was Leon Trotsky’s birth name, and the name he was still using during his years in Vienna.

After a moderate wait in line (about 30 minutes) we were seated, and took a moment to take in the cavernous interior, its huge portraits of Kaiser Franz Joseph and his wife Empress Elisabeth (or ‘Sisi’ as she is more commonly known) and its circular in-house shop selling all kinds of beautiful, delicate Viennoiserie. We ordered our Sachertorte and, on a whim, I also ordered a slice of Cafe Central Torte, because it was the house thing and it looked a bit like Sachertorte.

The house torte was fantastic. Layers of light chocolate sponge, soft nutty marzipan and an orange sponge soaked in citrus drizzle, with a covering of milk chocolate icing. We nearly bought a whole one to bring home. The cafe melange was fabulous. The Sachertorte was… fine. A bit on the dry side despite the dual layers of apricot jam, but the icing was rich and the whipped cream was particularly good. We loved our visit to Cafe Central - we actually went twice during the trip, sneaking in a quick final visit on the morning we flew home - but did it teach us anything about Sachertorte that we didn’t already know?

Restaurant at Cafe Central - you can just about see Sisi’s portrait to the back left

The ‘Not Sachertorte at All’ - Cafe Central

Findings and conclusions

We landed at a rainy Manchester airport full of holiday cheer and with a suitcase stuffed with Mozartkugel. We had succeeded in having a wonderful time, but had we succeeded in our research project? What did we learn about Sachertorte in its home town?

In ranking terms, Hotel Sacher came out on top, followed by Cafe Central and Demel coming a distant third.
Don’t stop at one layer of apricot jam. It’s a minimum of two or bust.
The chocolate icing has got to be as dark and rich as you can manage. Milk chocolate just doesn’t cut it.
Original recipes aren’t always the best. We adapt and improve. It’s how we grow as people and make better cake.
The Sachertorte Toast Sandwich wasn’t a Sachertorte at all, but the Cafe Central Torte for both of us.

So, what about your research question, Sarah and Jane?

Sarah & Jane - Like so many things in life, Sachertorte has the potential to be good but most manifestations veer more towards shit. That’s as good as it gets, folks. Thank God neither of us tried to forge a career in academia.

One Fish Street, St Ives (Cornwall)

Rogan & Co, Cartmel (*)