Café Sacher + the State Opera

There it is — the Vienna State Opera, the Staatsoper, filling the view ahead. When it opened in eighteen sixty-nine it was the very first great building on the Ringstraße, the grand boulevard the emperor threw up around the old city. It's all nineteenth-century swagger, in a rich historicist style borrowed from the French Renaissance — the architecture of an empire at its most confident.

But we've come for what's tucked just behind it: the Hotel Sacher, and the most contested slice of cake in the world. The Sachertorte — dark, dense chocolate, a thin layer of apricot jam, a smooth coat of glaze — was invented back in eighteen thirty-two by a sixteen-year-old apprentice named Franz Sacher, standing in for the head chef in the kitchen of a famous prince. His cake outlived him and became Vienna itself, in dessert form.

And now the feud we planted back at Demel. For seven years, starting in the nineteen-fifties, the Hotel Sacher and the confectioner Demel fought in court over who could call their cake the genuine Sachertorte. The Viennese press called it the Sweet War. It ended not with a winner but with a truce: a settlement that let the Hotel Sacher label its cake 'The Original Sacher-Torte,' while Demel kept its own special seal. So both are real, both are delicious, and the only honest way to settle it is to try a slice of each. A quarrel this civilised could only be Viennese.

From here, walk southwest, down past the side of the Opera. We're heading for a great open-air market — and a glittering golden dome.