Café Sperl

Where it sits. Café Sperl occupies the corner of Gumpendorfer Straße 11 and Lehárgasse in Mariahilf, Vienna's 6th district, about five minutes' walk southwest of the Secession building and the Naschmarkt and a similar distance from the Academy of Fine Arts. The room is long, high and lit on two sides by tall windows, and it runs back from the street to a raised area with two carambole billiard tables. It is a listed building, protected on the Austrian register of historic places, and it looks it: parquet floors, bentwood Thonet chairs, marble tabletops, brass fittings, crystal chandeliers, and newspapers on wooden holders that regulars still take without asking.

The story behind it. Jacob Ronacher opened the place in 1880 as Café Ronacher, in a building whose interior was designed by the architects Wilhelm Jelinek and Anton Groß in the manner of the grand Ringstraße cafés then defining the genre. Within a year he sold it to the Sperl family, whose name stuck, and in 1884 it passed to Adolf Kratochwilla. Before 1914 the clientele mixed painters, architects, composers and actors with officers from the nearby imperial and royal military academy — the future Austro-Hungarian chief of staff Franz Conrad von Hötzendorf among them — and the young hopefuls rejected by the Academy of Fine Arts around the corner, including, notoriously, Adolf Hitler, who was turned down twice and was remembered as a loud political bore. Manfred Staub bought the café in 1968 and restored it in 1983 rather than modernising it, which is the decision that preserved what is on view now. It was named Austrian coffee house of the year in 1998 and took the Golden Coffee Bean in 2004.

On screen. Sperl is the coffee house in Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995): the scene in which Jesse and Céline sit at a marble table and stage a pair of imaginary telephone calls to friends back home, each describing the other, is played out in this room. Linklater shot the whole film in Vienna over the summer of 1994 on a small budget and mostly on real locations, which is why the city in it still matches the city outside — the Riesenrad, the record-shop listening booth, the small café where a palm reader interrupts the pair. Sperl's interior has had two further screen lives: David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (2011), where it stands in for the Vienna of Freud and Jung, and the long American miniseries The Winds of War, which used both interior and exterior. A 2011 Vienna Philharmonic film of Strauss and Kreisler was recorded here as well.

What you actually see today. The house works to the ordinary rules of Viennese coffee-house culture, on the UNESCO list of intangible cultural heritage since 2011: a coffee is ordered by name — Melange, kleiner Brauner, Einspänner with its cap of whipped cream in a glass — it arrives on a small silver tray with a glass of tap water, and the table is then yours for as long as you care to sit. Nobody will hurry a single cup and a newspaper through two hours. The kitchen does Viennese classics at fair prices, apple strudel and Sachertorte among the cakes, and breakfast until early afternoon. The billiard tables are in use most evenings and are part of the room's texture rather than a museum piece. Piano music is played on some afternoons. The regulars still include writers — Jörg Mauthe, Robert Menasse and Michael Köhlmeier have all worked at these tables — which is why the room is quieter than its size suggests. The billiards are carambole, played on pocketless tables and rented by the hour at the counter, and the house keeps cues and chalk behind the bar for anyone who asks.

Getting there and timing. U2 to Museumsquartier or U4 to Kettenbrückengasse, each about eight minutes' walk; trams 57A and 59A stop on Gumpendorfer Straße itself. It is closed on some Sundays and public holidays outside the main season, so check before making it the point of a trip. Weekday afternoons between lunch and the evening are the quietest, and winter, with the windows fogged and the lamps on, shows the room at its best. Card payment is accepted but cash is still normal, and a small rounding-up tip is customary. There is a step at the entrance and the raised billiard area is up further steps, which limits step-free access; the front section is reachable with assistance. Photography is tolerated when it is discreet and not when it involves lights or tripods.