Hotel Sacher Wien

The Hotel Sacher behind the Opera is the home of the Original Sacher-Torte, served with unsweetened whipped cream in the red Café Sacher and sold in wooden boxes from the shop next door.

Franz Sacher invented the torte in 1832 as an apprentice at Metternich’s court; his son Eduard opened the hotel in 1876, and his widow Anna Sacher ran it with cigars and bulldogs into a Viennese legend. The torte, a chocolate sponge with apricot jam under a dark chocolate glaze, is made by hand in the hotel’s bakery, some 360,000 a year, and sold in the shop and the cafés. The Café Sacher, red velvet and crystal, serves it with a dome of unsweetened whipped cream and a Melange; the queue outside is for the café, and it moves.

The Sacher also runs a full afternoon tea and a pastry kitchen that serves the Rote Bar and the Grüne Bar restaurants; but the torte is the reason, and the hotel knows it.