"Founded in 1705, Café Tomaselli, which is located on the Alter Markt just a few steps away from the Salzburg Cathedral and the famous Getreidegasse, is Austria’s oldest "Viennese coffee house". The Tomaselli continues to be a stylish representative of a 300-year-old Austrian coffee-house tradition. Now, as ever, a popular gathering place for an array of illustrious personalities, where such prominent figures as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Max Reinhardt and Herbert von Karajan, were regularly to be seen. Splendid inlayed wood paneling decorates the walls, marble tables, silver trays, classic newspaper stands, Tuxedo-clad waiters and "kitchen maids" transport 21st-century guests back into "the good old days".
Every day, customers can select from a broad assortment of coffee specialties, as well as some 40 different home-made cakes and pastries, and small meals brought out to the guests on big trays.
Opening hours:
Hot food from 7 a.m. - 9 p.m.
During Festival Season until 12 a.m."
--Salzburg Info (
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"The Cafe Tomaselli in the Alter Markt in the city of Salzburg is the oldest operating cafe in Austria. Its history dates back to the year 1700. It is from March 12, 1852 in the possession of the Tomaselli family. Only in 2003 the historian Gerhard Ammerer found out while researching the history of the café that it was not founded in 1703, as is on the facade, but already in 1700. At that time Johann Fontaine received approval from the authorities to open the first "coffee dispensing" cafe in Salzburg. It was initially located in the Golden Lane and was not a real cafe, but a meeting place for students. In 1764 the rights to the coffee bar were acquired by Anton Staiger, who founded the Café at the current location; it was named "Staiger". Staiger was the steward of Archbishop Siegmund III of Schrattenbach. He made the cafe a posh establishment for the upper middle class. Even Mozart was often a Staiger guest, as he noted in his writings. Michael Haydn also was a personal friend of Staiger. After the death of Anton Staiger on January 2, 1781, his son Franz Anton took over the café and enlarged it with the purchase of two business stores. After his death in 1819 it came to his son Joseph, but soon let it to tenants.
In 1852 Johanna Staiger sold the café to the "trained confectioner" Carl Tomaselli, the son of the tenor Giuseppe Tomaselli from Milan. The family interacted with the family of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart's widow, Constanze von Nissen, who had remarried, also lived in this house from 1820 to 1826. Tomaselli complemented the existing range of coffee, tea and cocoa to cream. In 1859 the kiosk was opened opposite the Café Tomaselli, which in the summer is a meeting place of cultivated sociability today. A few years later a second set Tomaselli billiards and games room was added, then in 1891 the "ladies' parlor" was added; until then, visits had been reserved exclusively for men. In 1937-38 the Tomaselli terrace designed by architect Otto Prossinger was built. Otherwise, the café has remained largely unchanged.
After the Second World War, the café was seized for several years by the Americans, and to some extent operated under the name Forty Second Street Café as an American coffee shop. In 1950, it was, however, returned the Tomaselli family. The cafe is now run by the fifth generation of the family."
--Wikipedia (using Google Translate with modifications) (
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