Sigmund Freud's practice was located at Berggasse 19 in the ninth district, a few blocks north-north-west of Vienna's Ringstrasse. The Ring is where Freud would take his daily constitutional, no doubt taking in the great construction projects of his age -- the new city hall, the university, parliament, and the Burgtheater -- and when he would walk no more, he would retire to Café Landtmann on the ground floor of the Palais Lieben-Auspitz. Franz Landtmann opened his coffeehouse on October 1, 1873, at a time when those grand projects were still in their infancy: plans for the Burg had not yet been hatched; and the university and city hall had yet to be completed. The area then was a building site, but Landtmann clearly had a certain foresight, for Café Landtmann would soon become the Ringstrassen-Kaffeehaus, situated at a nexus of Viennese cultural, academic, and artistic power, patronised not only by Freud but many of the great actors and actress of the Burg, the composer Gustav Mahler, and the founders of Red Vienna like Karl Seitz and Julius Deutsch.
After Landtmann, ownership of Café Landtmann passed through many hands until it ended up in the possession of the Querfeld family, who bought the place back in 1976. Landtmann's main dining hall with its lavish interior decoration was a product of the previous ownership, Angela and Konrad Zauner, but it was the Querfelds who not only saved the place from possible extinction -- there were plans in the mid-1970s to turn Landtmann into a bank -- but added on many of the modern additions to the building like its winter garden at the front of the building. (Owners of several other coffeehouses in Vienna including Cafés Mozart and Museum, the Querfelds are also responsible, it must be said, for Landtmann's ever-increasing prices.) For its location and charm, Café Landtmann remains a destination coffeehouse, and in its dessert case is one signature cake: Landtmann's Feine Torte, constructed out of hazelnut genoise sponge layered with orange-scented marzipan and a hazelnut creme.
