A kilometre and a half of market between two roads, half of it genuine and half of it aimed at you.
There has been a market here since the eighteenth century, on the covered-over course of the Wien river, running between the two carriageways of the Wienzeile for about a kilometre and a half. It has around 120 stalls.
It has two halves and it is worth knowing which you are in.
The restaurant end
The Karlsplatz end is now mostly bars and restaurants with outdoor tables — sushi, Middle Eastern, seafood, wine bars — and stalls selling dried fruit, spices, oils and olives at prices set for visitors. Some of it is very good. None of it is cheap, and the hard-sell from the dried-fruit stalls is persistent.
The market end
Walk on. Towards Kettenbrückengasse the stalls become genuinely a market: Turkish and Balkan grocers, good cheese, fish, a butcher or two, vegetables at ordinary prices, and Viennese pensioners doing their shopping. The same saffron, the same olives and the same vinegar cost a fraction of what they do three hundred metres back.
What to buy
Austrian pumpkin seed oil from Styria, dark green and nutty, is the thing to take home — buy it here rather than at the airport. Käsekrainer and Austrian cheeses. Horseradish, fresh. Turkish and Balkan groceries are the market’s other strength, a legacy of Vienna’s postwar migration.
Saturday
The flea market at the Kettenbrückengasse end runs on Saturday mornings and is large, chaotic and genuinely worth an hour — books, records, china, tools, and a lot of unsorted junk. Come early. Bring cash.
The buildings
On the Linke Wienzeile above the market are two Otto Wagner apartment buildings of 1898–99: the Majolikahaus at number 40, its whole façade tiled in a pink floral pattern that runs across the windows, and number 38 next door with gilded medallions by Koloman Moser. They are among the most important buildings of Viennese Jugendstil and they are free to stand and look at.
Practicalities
Stalls are closed on Sundays; restaurants are variable. Weekday mornings are the best time for the market proper. Redevelopment plans for a market hall at the Karlsplatz end have been argued over for years — expect construction hoardings.
More Food & Drink
Café Central
Vaulted ceilings, a papier-mâché poet at a table by the door, and a queue outside that Trotsky did not have to join.
The Heurigen of Grinzing
Wine taverns in the vineyards at the edge of the city, where the tram terminates and Vienna stops being a capital.