Café Tomaselli

Austria's oldest coffee house has been serving caffeinated beverages on Salzburg's Alter Markt since a Frenchman named Johann Fontaine received a trade licence on March 31, 1700 to sell chocolate, tea, and coffee. That first shop, on nearby Goldgasse, was less a coffee house than a meeting place for university students. In 1764, Anton Staiger — major-domo to the archbishop — moved the operation to its current location on the Alter Markt and turned it into the most elegant café in town, attracting Salzburg's upper-middle class with the same social calculus that makes exclusive coffee shops work today.

Mozart was a regular. He came here to drink almond milk, which tells you something lovely about the man — one of history's greatest musical geniuses sitting in a coffee house drinking almond milk while the world around him argued about politics and weather. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who would later co-found the Salzburg Festival, and the great theatre director Max Reinhardt both frequented the café in the early 20th century.

In 1852, Johanna Staiger sold the café to the confectioner Carl Tomaselli, son of the Milanese tenor Giuseppe Tomaselli, and the family has run it ever since. The current Tomaselli is the fifth generation. That kind of continuity — over 320 years as a coffee house, 170 years under one family — is rare anywhere in the world and almost unheard of in the hospitality industry.

The café sits on the Alter Markt, Salzburg's oldest marketplace, and the ritual is unchanged: choose from the Tortenfrau's tray of pastries, order a Melange or an Einspänner, and sit at a marble-topped table watching the square. The terrace seats overlook the market fountain and, in December, the Christmas market stalls. It is the closest thing Salzburg has to a living room.