Breakfast to midnight: eating your way through Vienna

Vienna eats to a schedule refined over centuries. There is a correct hour for strudel, a correct hour for schnitzel, and a gloriously incorrect hour for sausages. Here is the full day, eaten properly.

Key facts

• The classic coffee order is a melange — roughly a Viennese cappuccino
• Lunch is the traditional main meal; many gasthäuser offer weekday set menus
• Würstelstände (sausage stands) keep late hours and anchor the city's night-food culture

9:00 — Coffeehouse breakfast

Begin where Vienna begins: a grand coffeehouse. Order a melange with a semmel roll, butter and jam, or a soft-boiled egg in a glass, and take a newspaper from the rack. Nobody will hurry you — the coffeehouse is, as the Viennese say, the extended living room of the city.

11:00 — A market wander

Stroll the Naschmarkt, Vienna's famous market mile: stalls of pickles, cheeses, breads and spices, threaded with small eateries. Graze lightly — a bite of cheese here, an olive there — because the day's main event is close.

13:00 — Schnitzel o'clock

Lunch is the hour for Wiener schnitzel: veal pounded thin, breaded and fried to a golden ripple, served with potato salad and a wedge of lemon. Purists insist on veal; the pork version is the everyday standby. The alternative classic is tafelspitz — boiled beef with apple-horseradish and chive sauce, the dish Emperor Franz Joseph famously favoured.

16:00 — Cake, ceremonially

Mid-afternoon is jause, Vienna's sacred cake pause. The Sachertorte — dense chocolate cake with apricot jam, invented for Prince Metternich's court and made famous by Hotel Sacher — is the icon; the apfelstrudel with whipped cream is its rival. Have one of them (or both; we won't tell) with a small black coffee.

18:30 — Wine at a heuriger

Ride out to the vineyard villages on the city's edge, such as Grinzing, where heurigen — wine taverns run by the growers themselves — pour the young vintage in leafy courtyards. Food comes from a buffet priced by weight: roast pork, spreads, breads and pickles.

21:00 — A proper dinner, or not

If the heuriger buffet didn't finish you, the city's beisl (bistro) tradition offers gulasch with dumplings or zwiebelrostbraten — roast beef under crisp fried onions. Otherwise, skip straight to the finale.

24:00 — The midnight würstelstand

Every great Viennese night ends at a sausage stand. The order is a käsekrainer — a cheese-filled sausage, affectionately nicknamed the "Eitrige" in Viennese slang — with mustard, a crust of bread and a canned beer, eaten standing among taxi drivers and opera-goers in equal numbers.

Tip: Do schnitzel at lunch, not dinner — the classic schnitzel houses are calmer, the set menus cheaper, and you leave room in the evening for the heuriger buffet, which is where Vienna actually relaxes.