Vienna’s Naschmarkt — A Permanent Street Market With Everything Including Cheap Wine And Bad Attitudes

“Hello!?” the older blonde woman behind one of the many counters in Vienna’s Naschmarkt is saying to me, her voice dripping with sarcasm in that particular manner that means, “You are not acting correctly and thus let me draw attention to your misbehavior.”

We had been standing in front of her counter in the market for only a few seconds.  My internal values tell me that a potential customer should be granted at least a bit of time to check things out and make a choice.  Her internal values said I should just ask for something, right now, and stop wasting time with actually looking at the selection.  We failed to resolve our philosophical difference, and thus parted ways without a transaction.

Later, we buy ten euros worth of fruit from another stand, all of it going bad within eight hours.  Time to rethink this.

 

The Naschmarkt is the largest market in Vienna, you will read somewhere, and everyone knows that in Europe, one heads to the market to hang out.  There is cheaper food, plus lots of drinks and photo ops aplenty.  Every Euro city is like this—besides visiting your Major Sights and finding the Tall Thing To Climb, one should head for the market.

 

I don’t know how anyone cannot find this attractive

 

Yet the Naschmarkt area is more than just a large warehouse holding veggies and raw meat for sale.  There are serious reasons you should hang out here, perhaps all day.  The restorative properties of a great market are not within doubt.  See my post on the Time Out Market in Lisbon.  Verily, what we must recognize about a great market, for us tourists, is not the quality of raw fish or cow tripe, as we don’t need that stuff.  Some things make great photos, but for visitors to the city, we need a market that provides:

Snacks to eat there

Snacks to go

Larger meals on site, if we feel the need

Hang out spots.  No point munching there if we’re not comfortable.

I’ve been in wonderful night markets in Taiwan, for instance, where I can buy fresh-cooked clam dishes, amazing.  They give me a take-away box and blimey, I then have nowhere to eat the damn things except leaning on concrete barricade on a frakking street corner on the edge of the area, because the fools who run the market don’t think to provide general seating, a hang-out place for people who visit who can then eat the food.  Only some individual stands have seating, and they don’t like you hanging around if you’re not buying directly from them.  The Naschmarkt doesn’t have this problem; there are a million places to hang.

 

A vinegar vendor, hanging out

 

The Naschmarkt is much less a centralized warehouse type than it is a collection area where small bars, pubs, snack bars, coffeehouses, undersized eateries, and of course varied stalls with produce, cheese, breads, prepared foods, and specialty items such as vinegars, can open.  Most of it is open-air, and thus it’s a long series of about three alleyways.  We were staying in the nearby Hotel Carlton Opera, a not-so-cheap flophouse that didn’t endear itself to us on its own meager merits, but its proximity to everything raises one’s spirits, especially as it’s a stone’s throw to the Naschmarkt.  We hung in Vienna for a while, and found ourselves heading to the Naschmarkt over and over.  It became our default activity.  I’ve never experienced a market that had so many delights along with so much frustration.

The bad:  The attitude I described at the beginning surfaced again and again.  The market is so popular with tourists that many vendors have no patience with them.  Many vendors mentally conveyed to me in strong terms that they are not present merely for the enjoyment of us visitors, but to do business, a reasonable attitude except that I certainly was willing to do business with some if they weren’t being such wankers to me.  You the gawker would squeak “Sorry, one minute,” to them as they clicked their tongue at you, the slowpoke who is trying to decide what to buy.  “Yes?” they’ll remind you in a few seconds, while you’re frantically scanning their offerings.  Should you be off-put enough to not buy anything from them, and this will indeed happen, the tut-tutting as you leave will indicate the vendor is self-confirming their worst verdict.  They can be especially damming if they’ve offered you a sample and you don’t buy.

The other bad: Not all that glitters is gold.  I relayed above that our first foray into buying fruit was a disaster, everything going bad quickly, but later attempts were successful.  The larger disappointment was some of the prepared foods.  Look at the selection below:

 

 

The seafood is great.  The stuff to the right stuffed with white cheese was not.  The cheese-stuffed grape leaves tasted chalky and sour, utter waste, and all the other stuff, the peppers and such, had the same cheese, so sad.

The good:  This still being Europe, most of the other food is quite pleasing.  The best thing is the atmosphere and opportunity to mine the place repeatedly.  I’d go back tomorrow just to hang out there, as beyond the eating or drinking, it’s just brilliant being there.  You’ll walk around and around, discovering new places every visit.  The Naschmarkt is one of those places where you leave thinking, “Why can’t my own city do something like this?”  Then again, I live in the USA; of course we can’t do this.

The other good is it truly does have something for everyone, and for different needs.  It’s good for any size or level of a dash or break or meal or haul that you need, and certainly isn’t limited to European foods, as we had Thai food there one evening.  You can find sushi, Vietnamese, and others.  Eastern Europe food is heavily represented, and Middle Eastern food especially is becoming popular.  The market is about 1.5 kilometers long, and I’ve seen estimates ranging from 120 to 170 stalls.

 

In general, one of the three alleys is restaurants and cafes and the other two alleys are stalls, but this gets mixed up.  Also in general, but also mixed up, is that the café alley tends to be higher-end stuff on the north-east end (towards the city center), and a bit cheaper going the other direction.

The market has an extension on its western end on Saturdays, where a very unorganized flea market (Flohmarkt) sets up.  Lots of plates, china, books, and things considered by the sellers to be antiques, though you may disagree.  You’ll also find linens, glassware, gems and jewelry, hand bags, and decorative items.  The antiques are the largest category, and many consider them to be somewhat overpriced, due to the tourists.  If you’re somewhat serious about any of these things, get there early.

 

You’ll find a table

 

The market is not cheap.  The stalls are cheaper than restaurants, but not cheaper than grocery stores, or even other markets.  Prices at the restaurants and cafes vary, but it’s hard to imagine a better hangout spot.  Besides the Asian food, we stopped for desserts quite often, and for palatschinken, a thin pancake with fillings, very Austrian.

Another thing very Austrian, and my favorite part of the market:  Sturm.  It’s what makes wandering the market so wonderful, and sadly, it’s not available all the time.  If you are there later in the year, you’ll see dozens of vendors selling this stuff, not as their specialty, but as an extra.  Sturm has several other German names, Federweißer, Suser, or Junger Wein.  It’s wine, but young wine, freshly pressed and at the early stages of fermentation, so it’s still cloudy and only about 4% alcohol.  It tastes like a cross between wine and grape juice, as that’s what it is, and its low alcohol means you can sip a great deal of it.  Best of all, it’s cheap, a euro or two for a glass, but not a wine-sized glass, a great deal more.  Vendors who normally sell other things, bread for instance, will have large jugs of the stuff to the side.  They’ll fill a plastic cup for you and you can keep browsing.  Very sadly, you have to be there at a certain time of year, autumn harvest time, to get this.

 

But even without the sturm, there are plenty of reasons to hang.

 

 

 

Naschmarkt

Location:  between Karlsplatz and Kettenbrückengasse
U4: Station Kettenbrückengasse
U1, U2, U4: Station Karlsplatz

Hours:  Most market food stands open before you get up, and stay around until 19:00 or so, depending on them.   Stalls tend to close when they feel like it.  The cafes and restaurants keep more standard hours.  Most things close down earlier on Saturdays, around 17:00, including the flea market, and almost everything is closed Sundays.  Weekdays are the less-crowded times.