When we made the decision a couple of years ago to visit Vienna's world-famous Christmas markets as the main focus of an eight day-long trip to Austria's capital, we were under no illusion that these things would occupy our time for an entire week. We knew we had to plan on more than just hanging out in front of the city hall or a palace or two or a few churches looking at endless Christmas tree ornament and handicraft stalls. So, plan we did. We ended up with a packed agenda which included day trips out of town; stops at museums; concerts in historical spots in the city on a couple of nights; and more architecture from the last 150 years or so than you could shake a stick at.
But we also knew that we wanted to linger at the Christmas markets beyond the time it took to check out each vendor's stall and pick up some souvenirs here and there. We knew we wanted to take in every possible bit of ambience at as many of the markets as we could. We wanted to revel in the atmosphere of a centuries-old tradition and feel what the people of Vienna get to feel every late November all the way through to the following new year. So, in addition to shopping and people-watching and checking out rides and skating rinks and nativity displays, we knew we'd have to do one more thing in our time at the Christkindlmarkts: eat and drink. Or maybe that's two more things.
After all, shopping is hungry and thirsty work, right?
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| Christmas market food. Brno, Czechia. |
Let's start with the drinking portion, shall we? After all, one of the traditions I was most looking forward to at these markets was mulling around a Christmas market or two with a cup of hot mulled wine in some intimate square in the old city or a grand plaza in front of an enormous church along the Ringstrasse, or maybe even a palace a bit further out of town. And maybe, just maybe, if I got really lucky, I'd find a mug in one of the markets that I loved so I could take it home as the ultimate souvenir of our trip to Vienna at this time of year.
Before we departed for Vienna, I made it my mission to find a mug. Yes, I know I talked about this in my first Christmas markets post but it bears repeating here. This was a quest! Here's how it works: buy a drink of glühwein or punsch (pronounced puuuuunsch as I was corrected at one stall...) at one of the many, many markets sprinkled all over the city and you are likely to end up paying about 8 Euros or so for a regular sized mug of liquid. Seem like a steep price to pay for about 4 or 5 fluid ounces of hot drink? It is. That's because half the price of the drink is for what you'll imbibe and the other half is a deposit on the mug.
We did this quite a few times both to have something tasty to warm us up and to try to find the perfect mug to take home. We ended up with two mugs. One is what I'd describe as a regular mug-shaped mug decorated with the Karlskirche and caricatures of some of the handmade wares from the Art Advent Christmas Market at the Karlsplatz. The other was the mug below, which was decidedly more delicate and glazed with a shell that was decidedly not resistant to the water pressure in the mug-washing machines at each market (you can perhaps see a large missing piece of glaze on the handle below).
Ultimately, we got what we came for here: a unique mug each, both in pretty good to perfect condition with the name of the market we got it from. I'd consider our mug quest a success.
But this part of this post is not supposed to be about the mug. It's supposed to be about what's inside the mug. And that? Well, a total mixed bag.
So first of all, and I know I already wrote this, I was really, really looking forward to this part of our Christmas market experience. I'd never honestly had hot mulled wine or punch outdoors in about freezing temperatures and they serve this stuff every year so it had to be good, right? Right? It must (with emphasis on MUST) enhance the Christmas market experience, right? Right?
Not so much. I gave it a shot, I swear. I made sure to have two mugs-full of glühwein and one of punsch and I really, really tried to like this stuff. My advice if you absolutely have to try glühwein: stay away from the white and stick to the red. The red was palatable. I believe I could use that term for it. Heck, in a pinch, I'd have some again and I'd probably say the same for the himbeerpunsch I ordered and drank all of. But the white? Never again. I'd describe it as tasting like Theraflu but that really would be doing Theraflu a disservice. It was really pretty disgusting. I ended up pouring out the last quarter or so. Couldn't do it.
Fortunately, they serve beer and wine at most markets so if you can't stand the hot stuff, you can still get something to drink while you wander around the market stalls. My personal wine quest for this trip was to find some grüner veltliner, an Austrian dry white wine which I would (in my very un-worldly wine way) describe as a lighter version of a chardonnay. I found it at the first market we visited. It's fantastic. Last year I found vinho verde in Portugal, this year I found grüner veltliner in Austria. I love both these wines and I did not limit my intake to Christmas markets. You can find this wine everywhere and that's a very, very good thing.
Three last things on the drinks before I move on. (1) I'm not sure how much alcohol any of this glühwein or punsch has in it. (2) Hot drinks don't stay hot long when it's a couple of degrees below freezing. And (3) I ordered himbeerpunsch figuring I had a greater chance of liking that drink because it's beer-based. It isn't and I have no idea why I was so stupid. Beer in German is berry. It was better than the glühwein but the wine and beer was still better. Just my take.
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| A glass of delicious grüner veltliner next to a mohn (poppy seed) pastry. Melk, Austria. |
Now for the food.
I didn't particularly expect to get amazing food at the Christmas markets we visited this month. It's not like we were sitting down at a Michelin starred restaurant for some innovative, ground-breaking cuisine. On some level, in fact, one could argue that the food for sale at outdoor stalls all over Vienna during the holiday season is essentially no better than fair food.
Indeed, this very thought and maybe something worse was running through my head when I was a couple of bites into what was probably one of the worst pretzels I've ever had in my life at the Altes AKH Christmas Market at the University of Vienna. I should have known it was not going to be so good as soon as they put it into the microwave before serving us.
We did actually plan to eat at some of the Christmas markets we visited. Like a whole meal. I figured we'd grab a table and bring back bite after bite from assorted stalls to eventually comprise a three course or whatever meal, which we'd accompany with some delicious glühwein or punsch. This is before I tasted said glühwein or punsch, remember. Yeah, that plan just didn't work very well at all. Our meals at the markets turned into a whole lot of snacking, sometimes at a table outside a food stall and sometimes food in hand while browsing for some Christmas loot.
I guess that was to be expected. After all, you don't need a table to eat the classic Christmas snack of chestnuts or a crispy, chewy, salty spiral cut potato on a skewer or a packet of potato slices with some garlic aioli. These foods are made for walking around. In fact, if you were to take these three bites back to a table I'm not sure how the table would actually help you. All three of those by the way: good stuff for shopping and eating.
But ultimately, we wanted more. And hunt long enough and you are bound to find some decent Christmas market food that you actually might want to eat over and over. We did.
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| Potatoes (spiral cut in Vienna and pancake in Brno, Czechia) and the world's least tasty pretzels. |
Before we get to my favorite bites, let me say that if I were looking to eat a whole meal at one of the markets we visited, I would probably do it in Brno, Czechia. They had dishes which it looked like you could actually pair with each other to make a fairly nutritious table setting. I'm talking about skewers of braised meats and vegetables on the side (not the greasy potato pancake shown above, necessarily) and some quality desserts.
Now, admittedly, the key words in the previous paragraph are "looked like" because we didn't actually do much food tasting in Brno on account of what seemed to be our enormous daily breakfast at our hotel in Vienna. But if I were to go back to one market that we didn't eat a meal at to do so, it would have been at Brno. Bring your appetite because the portions are giant. We watched three dudes purchase a skewer of chicken to split between the three of them and it didn't look like any of them would go hungry.
I can also vouch for the Christmas cake with custard and a brandied cherry you'll find here. I had to sheepishly admit to my mother that I had this dish because I generally pass on her homemade Christmas cake every December. Hers doesn't come with custard and a brandied cherry, though.
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| Chestnuts in Vienna and Christmas cake in Brno, Czechia. |
I'm not sure if it's fate or whatever, but the best food we had at Christmas markets in Vienna (or anywhere else) this month were two of the exact same markets where we found the best overall market experience, namely the Karlsplatz Christmas Market and the Christmas Market at Schönbrunn Palace. These two markets had some of the best atmosphere, the best backdrops to the market and for sure the best food. If I only had time to visit two markets in Vienna, it would have to be these two, with a shoutout to the Old Viennese Christmas Market on Freyung, which served us some pretty good spiralkartoffel (shown above), which was also the cheapest we found by a lot.
I guess in a perfect world, I would not have left Vienna without downing some local sauerkraut as part of a meal, but on the second to last day in town, I don't think I'd even seen any in a restaurant or a market stall or anywhere else. Until we stopped at the Schönbrunn Palace, that is. We had made it about three quarters of the way around the market and it was about sunset time when we found a stall with food we hadn't seen at any other market we'd visited: potato dumplings filled with meat or veg and served with a side of sauerkraut.
These things were amazing. The dish was warm and comforting and it stayed that way until we polished the whole thing off which gave us a little fuel to make it around the rest of the market. They were also topped with some crispy bits which gave it texture and spice and they went perfectly with a cold beer. Plus they checked the box on the "perfect world" checklist for Vienna.
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| Dumplings with beer at the Schönbrunn Palace (top) and authentic French crepes at the Karlsplatz (bottom). |
The Market at Schönbrunn Palace was actually my number one market overall of the 14 that we visited in our eight days in and around Vienna. But food-wise, the Art Advent Christmas Market on the Karlsplatz took the cake (so to speak). The Market on the Karlsplatz strives to be a cut above some of the other markets. Securing a stall selling Christmas wares in the market requires a juried approval and all of the food and drink is organic.
Now, I recognize that sometimes labeling something as organic often amounts to nothing more than a gimmick to sell you food or drink at a marked-up price (that's the very rarely seen cynical side of me coming out) but the food we ate on the Karlsplatz was honestly the best market food of the trip. The chestnuts were good, the potato slices with garlic aioli were satisfying and they had a killer authentically French (OK, so they were just speaking French and maybe not actually from France...) stand that served up some very good chocolate and hazelnut crepes.
They also had raclette.
I guess I had sort of a loose form of a checklist of what I wanted to eat in Vienna. Schnitzel, Sachertorte, bergkäse and maybe a few others. But raclette was probably the only thing that I specifically wanted to eat at a Christmas market. If raclette doesn't ring any bells, it's an alpine cheese that melts easily and smoothly which is served heated as a side to other foods or just simply by itself over something like a slice of bread. It comes in big wheels (doesn't all the best cheese come in big wheels?) and is heated over a flame until the top of the cheese is melty and just scooped right off. This was my Christmas market food quest.
And sure enough, when we first arrived at the Karlsplatz, we saw a stall selling raclette on bread with or without ham. I made a beeline and ordered a slice of bread with cheese, no ham. I wanted my raclette experience to be unsullied by other flavors.
Raclette. Bread. That's all I needed. Well, maybe some toppings...
Part of the charm of this particular dish is watching the assembly. The stall had five cheese melters (not sure what else to call these machines) each capable of producing the required gooey, delicious raclette for a slice of bread or so. You order, your slice of bread gets placed on a bread-sized, cardboard tray and popped on top of a melter waiting for the cheese to get to the right consistency before it's ready to be scraped onto your slice and handed over. The wait is mouth-watering. There were a couple of orders ahead of mine and I wanted to grab each one as it was delivered to the counter.
There are a series of condiments on the counter. When my order was ready, I added some diced raw onions, salt and pepper. I passed on the paprika and everything else. What could be better than raw onions, salt and pepper on top of melted cheese? Let's find a spot to eat.
Raclette is difficult to eat by hand standing up off a cardboard tray, did you know that?
It's so good though. Just that mild but clearly cheesy and totally smooth cheese with the salt and pepper and the raw onions. This is what I came all the way to Vienna to find. OK, maybe not JUST that but this was the Christmas market food experience I wanted. I have never had cheese on bread quite this way before and with the possible exception of eating a hunk of blue cheese on baguette while seated on a street corner in Paris, this was the best cheese and bread experience of my life. It was perfect.
I think we got exactly what we wanted and expected out of our 14 Christmas market visits over eight days. Maybe not the specifics of how and when and where but the overall effect was what we wanted and needed out of this trip. The shopping, the atmosphere, the tradition, the mugs (!!!), the history, the gorgeous backdrops formed by famous buildings and places, and yes...the food. I can't imagine we'll take another trip this focused on Christmas markets ever and that's truly OK with me. Not to say that we'll never find ourselves here at home or abroad visiting a market before the holidays but how could another trip top Vienna?
How We Did It
My comments here are largely the same as those I posted at the end of my Christkindlmarkts post.
Visit Vienna from late November to early January and you are going to be hard pressed to NOT visit a Christmas market, even if you don't want to. These things are literally everywhere, especially between the Ringstrasse (or maybe just outside the Ringstrasse) and the Danube River. Based on our experience this month, the same is true of markets in the towns and cities around Vienna.
We spent a lot of time planning our visits to the markets in Vienna. I found the site Visiting Vienna to be an essential guide for most things planning relative to Vienna, but especially for Christmas market visiting. Click on the link in the previous sentence for that site's 2022 Christmas markets post. I should note most markets have their own website. Rather than listing all those here in this post, I'd suggest you just start with Visiting Vienna. There's a list of markets on the right side of post linked in this paragraph. We visited the first 11 on the list.
It is difficult to get a sense of the food quality in these markets from their websites and it's a little different going to eat than it is going to shop. Presumably, if you are going to eat it's because you are hungry and don't want to NOT eat. Generally speaking, I'd say that the internet buzz about the stalls in a particular market matched their food quality. I'm not sure this is an all-pervasive observation but we found the best quality food at the markets described as having higher quality goods for sale.
Finally and maybe most importantly: browsing is free and most of the food we ate was relatively low cost. I think you will struggle to spend more than 10 Euros at a time here.
