I'm sitting here eating a Brezel Donut -- which is, as the name implies, a donut shaped like a pretzel -- and I'm thinking to myself, Actually, this isn't bad. It's a little doughy, perhaps, and there's more of an appearance as opposed to a noticeable taste of cinnamon, but still, not bad. The donut in question came from McDonald's -- which, as everyone knows, produces some of the finest food in the world from the Sausage Egg McMuffin, a breakfast food without parallel, to the Chicken Barbecue and 1955 Burger. McDonald's only arrived in Vienna in 1977, opening their first restaurant in the ground floor of Palais Wertheim on Schwarzenbergplatz, which led to 100 restaurants opening nationwide by 1997. But of greater significance to us is the year 2006 when the McCafé concept, born in Australia, was imported by way of a test run in the historic market town of Rum in Tyrol. Today, of the 194 McDonald's in Austria, 179 contain McCafés, a testament to the speed at which Austrians took to the idea -- how it became, in a very short period of time, an established and respectable meeting place akin to the Kaffeehaus and Konditorei.
In addition to muffins, cookies, and cheesecake -- the sort of things one would otherwise only find in Vienna at somewhere like Starbucks -- what distinguishes the Viennese McCafé is that it contains imitations of or riffs on desserts that one would otherwise only find either in a Konditorei or perhaps the chiller section of a decent supermarket. At the moment, for example, they offer a Kardinalschnitte, a Marzipantorte, and a Schwarzwälder Kirsch Schnitte or black forest gateau in addition to Topfengolatsche and a Buttermilch-Schnitte that comes in strawberry or raspberry flavour. In that sense, the genius behind McCafé, the secret I think to its success particularly with an older demographic, is that it's an immediate and achievable version of something with which Austrians were already familiar. The coffee is good, the price points for its cakes are far from over-the-top and they look, at the very least, like the real McCoy. It has self-service and the cafe areas are usually clean, comfortable, and well-ordered. The fact is, given the sheer amount of consumer choice in this area, if McCafé were bad, the Viennese wouldn't be going there. Now back to my donut.
