Vienna Food Tours
Vienna eats grandly and simply at once: the coffee houses where a Melange and a slice of cake are a way of life, the Naschmarkt, the sausage stands that never close, and the imperial classics — Wiener Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, Sachertorte and warm apple strudel. This is our Vienna food hub. Below are the top-rated food experiences, then our wine and cooking pages.
Top-rated food experiences in Vienna
Market, sausage-stand and coffee-house tastings
Why Vienna for food? Because it turned coffee and cake into a UNESCO-listed culture, keeps a great market and a sausage-stand tradition, and still cooks the dishes of an empire — and has vineyards inside the city.
Formats: food tours of the Naschmarkt and old town with tastings and a coffee-house stop; sausage-stand and market crawls; cooking classes and wine and Heuriger tours (see their own pages).
What to eat: Wiener Schnitzel, Tafelspitz, Käsekrainer from the Würstelstand, Sachertorte, apple strudel, Kaiserschmarrn, and a Melange in a coffee house.
The coffee house and the cake
The Viennese coffee house is a UNESCO-listed intangible heritage, and rightly: a marble-topped world where you order a Melange or an Einspänner, it arrives with a glass of water, and you stay for hours with a newspaper and a slice of cake. The cake is often Sachertorte, the dense chocolate-and-apricot torte whose “original” Hotel Sacher and Demel still dispute, or warm Apfelstrudel. A food tour always builds in a coffee-house stop.
The market, the sausage stand and the imperial kitchen
The Naschmarkt is the city’s great market, a long run of stalls of cheese, olives, spices and street food. On the street, the Würstelstand sausage stands are a Viennese institution, open late, serving the cheese-filled Käsekrainer and the Bosna. And the sit-down classics come from the imperial table: Wiener Schnitzel, veal pounded thin and fried golden; Tafelspitz, the boiled beef that was Emperor Franz Joseph’s favourite; and Gulasch.
How to do it
Food tours run three to four hours, market to coffee house, with tastings; a tour on the first day maps the city’s food. To cook the schnitzel and strudel yourself, see our Vienna cooking classes; to drink the city’s own wine in its Heuriger taverns, our Vienna wine tours.
Frequently asked questions
What is the one thing to eat in Vienna?
A proper Wiener Schnitzel, and a slice of Sachertorte in a coffee house with a Melange; a Käsekrainer from a sausage stand for the street version.
Why are Vienna’s coffee houses special?
They are a UNESCO-listed cultural institution — places to linger for hours over coffee and cake, served with a glass of water, not just grab a drink.
What is Tafelspitz?
Boiled beef in broth with apple-horseradish and chive sauce, the Emperor’s favourite dish and a Viennese classic to seek out.
Read next: What is a Heuriger? Vienna’s wine taverns explained
How we choose
We list only experiences with a strong rating over a meaningful number of reviews and free cancellation where available, and we favour small-group and family-run hosts. FindEatLocal earns a commission when you book through GetYourGuide or Viator links on this page; it doesn’t change the price you pay. More about how we choose.