Caffè Tommaseo

Strudel, Sacher torte and Habsburg habits

Apple strudel and Sacher torte tell you where Trieste sits. Both are Austrian by descent and both are entirely at home in a city that spent centuries as the Habsburg empire's port, and they belong to the same Central European pastry tradition the room was built for. They are the clearest things to order alongside a coffee.

The kitchen goes well beyond a pastry counter. The house has run as a restaurant as well as a coffeehouse for most of its life, with breakfast treated as a quiet start, lunch as a lighter, balanced pause and dinner as the more considered meal of the day. The oldest food detail on record is that the founder originally sold ice cream here, which is a fair reminder that the sweet side came first.

Trieste's oldest coffeehouse, open since 1830

Caffè Tommaseo has traded since 1830, when a merchant who had come to Trieste for business opened it, and it is described as the city's oldest continuously operating coffeehouse. It stands on Piazza Tommaseo, a short walk from Piazza Unità, in the most prominent part of the city. The name arrived after the uprisings of 1848, in tribute to Niccolò Tommaseo, the Dalmatian writer and patriot.

Its tables carry a literary roll call: Italo Svevo, James Joyce and Umberto Saba among the writers who used the room, along with Stuparich and Quarantotti Gambini. Since 1954 it has been recognised as a historical and cultural monument of the city, which is unusual for a working cafe and explains why so little of the interior has been allowed to change.

What the room is like

Heavy wooden doors open into a shelter from the Bora, the wind that comes down over Trieste, and the first thing that registers is the smell of roasted coffee and aged wood. Large Belgian mirrors, imported by the founder when the cafe opened, run along the walls, the ceiling carries plaster stucco, and the room still keeps the shape it had when it was lit by gas lamps.

The effect is a Central European salon preserved inside a modern city, and it works best used the way it always has been: a coffee and a strudel in the front room, a longer lunch, or a slower dinner once the room quietens. Come for the coffeehouse culture and the Austrian-Italian sweets, and let the service move at the pace the room sets.