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Vollpension, the Viennese Café where Grandmas Bake Your Cake
In most big cities, young people and old people live next to each other, but they have nothing in common. There is no place where the generations meet or come together. And that’s not good for either side because the young can benefit from the seniors’ life experiences and the seniors can feel appreciated and engaged, rather than feeling lonely. Is there a way for them to interact with each other, as humans used to do when lived in villages and small towns?
That is the idea behind Vienna’s generational café called Vollpension, which derives its name from the German words for “full pension,” and also means “room and board.” David Haller and Julia Krenmayr who run Vollpension, wanted to bring the generations together in a living room type of setting where grandmas and grandpas, called Omas and opas in German, can interact with young people. “We wanted to make this a generational café that feels like your grandmother’s living room,” says David Haller who runs Vollpension together with Julia Krenmayr.
The vision for Vollpension originated from a very dry piece of cake two friends of Haller and Krenmayr were eating in a Viennese café a few years ago. They realized they both missed a good homemade cake baked by someone’s grandmother to the utmost perfection. They also realized they missed the grandmas who baked those cakes. And so the idea of a granny’s café was born.
When Haller and Krenmayr placed a job ad in a big Austrian daily newspaper, looking for Omas and Opas interested in baking, they were amazed at how many seniors applied. The seniors loved baking, but they also were excited about the possibility of earning some extra money to supplement their small pensions which weren’t enough to live on. The café immediately took off.
“We had no experience and model to look at, so we learned everything from scratch,” says Haller. “In the first four years we made every mistake you can make. So we always said ‘ok that didn’t work but this did,’ so we continued with what did work.” And that’s another concept behind Vollpension, he adds. It mimics what life is. “Life is not perfect and grandmas aren’t perfect and the young people are not perfect,” Haller says. The cakes, however, are perfect—because they are your wonderful grandmother’s cakes. “That’s the magic of Vollpension,” Haller says. “It helps people to calm down, relax, and feel at home.” Be yourself and not worry about a thing. Because that’s how you would feel when you came to see your grandma and savor the cake she baked for you.
Vienna’s würstels—the sausages sold at würstelstands, little kiosks around the city — are legendary. They are the beloved street food of the posh Austrian capital.
The sausages became popular in the early 1800s, after the Napoleonic wars bankrupted Austria. Meat prices surged, pushing the poor to use every scrap.
Returning from the war, disabled soldiers couldn’t work in the fields or factories, so they sold würstels at würstelstands—and a new street food tradition was born.
It’s simply impossible to visit the city without chomping down a few würstels—frankfurters, bratwursts and käsekrainers. The last of these comes with added cheese that melts on the grill and then bursts like a scrumptious fat bomb in one’s mouth.
Modern vendors like Michael Lanner, who grew up eating traditional würstels, are also experimenting with new flavors, such as vegetarian sausages and novel spices, jalapenos, salsa criolla, and curry masala. We interviewed Lanner in the video above.