Café Exchange

Espresso where cashier 21 used to stand

A silver La Marzocco now occupies the spot where cashier number 21 once worked, which is the neatest summary of what this café is. The coffee is locally roasted and artisan, with espresso pulled on that machine and filter coffee running alongside it, and the house works exclusively with independent producers, among them Prem Frischkaffee and Felix Kaffee. That is not a slogan here: the person running the kitchen visits roasters, milk suppliers, brewers, winemakers, vegetable growers and juice producers, and the drinks list follows those relationships rather than a distributor's catalogue. It makes for a short, considered coffee programme in a building most people enter for other reasons.

Under Otto Wagner's glass roof

The setting does much of the work. Café Exchange sits in the former cash hall of the Postsparkasse, the Postal Savings Bank, and its adjoining rooms, a landmark designed by Otto Wagner and built between 1904 and 1906 for Georg Coch, founder of the Austrian Postal Savings Bank. The glass roof, the aluminium columns, the floor of glass blocks and the ingenious ventilation all shape the experience of sitting there, and the hall fills with light in a way no modern room manages. The café shares the space with the Angewandte Interdisciplinary Lab, so art students, workers and visitors mix at the tables, and a building that reads as a pilgrimage site for architecture followers stays in daily public use rather than becoming a museum piece. Carpets and seating soften the hall enough to work in, and the café opens part of the university's internal world to anyone who walks in off the square.

Matcha, lemonade, kombucha or cake

Beyond coffee, the drinks run to matcha, homemade lemonades, Demeter juices, home-brewed kombucha, beer, and wines both local and international, which is a wider list than most daytime cafés attempt. The food is international vegetarian cooking with a changing lunch menu: Southeast Asian curries, kimbap rolls, salads, dals and modern Mediterranean plates, depending on the week. The patisserie is made in house, and the seasonal cakes and sweet pastries are the clearest dessert order, the kind of baking that justifies staying an extra half hour under the glass. Come for espresso or filter, stay for lunch, and finish with cake; the room rewards a slower visit more than a takeaway cup.