“Kaffeehauskultur” is what the locals pride themselves on in Vienna. The tradition dates back to hundreds of years and takes place in one of Vienna’s 100 unique traditional coffee shops.
Vienna resident Eugene Quinn launched his project with the aim of opening up the European city to fresh and global cultures, shedding any stereotypical notions of what a metropolitan city like Vienna, has to offer.
The Coffeehouse Conversations are hosted once a month, and involve the pairing of a local from Vienna with a stranger from anywhere across the world. The pair sit for dinner, a glass of wine or coffee in one of Vienna’s endless traditional coffeehouses and aim to forge a deep and meaningful connection.
The Viennese coffeehouse tradition is something with has been recognised by UNESO as “intangible, cultural heritage.” Quinn notes that “the coffeehouses in Vienna have this lovely intimacy – an old-school, grand quality, which is designed for encouraging conversation,” he says. “That gets you over the first hurdle, but the first few minutes with a stranger are odd – you wonder why you’ve been chose to sit with that person.”
Inside of the coffeehouse, each table is equipped with a “question menu”, intended to aid the two participants with engaging in conversation.
The aim of the monthly event is to trigger “big talk”, and not common small talk, Quinn explains. He seeks to revive the debates which would take place amongst scholars in said coffee shops during the early 20th Century, by assisting the participants with questions such as “which part of your life was a waste of time?”, “what different kinds of love have you known in your life?” or, “how important is money to you?” The aim is to engage in deeper, more complex and more meaningful conversation.
The participants are explicitly rearranged or matched up together in order to build bridges not only between different nations, but also between diverse cultures and religions, age groups, ethnicities, as well as political preferences and sexual orientations.
The founder of the movement hopes that this initiative will invite participants, particularly international ones, to abandon their clichéd notions of the Austrian capital, and open their minds up to the real and present Vienna, through their conversations with the locals.
To date, visitors hailing from over 68 countries around the globe were recorded as having participated in this project. Although the concept was launched with purely platonic intent, Quinn admits that it has resulted in three marriages since its initiation in 2013.
Unlike other European destinations, Quinn believes that Vienna is seen as a concrete home to conferences and business meetups, with visitors only being exposed to the walls of its airport and hotels.
The Coffeehouse Conversations are an opportunity to forge a more organic, intimate and transparent relationship with the city, even if only for a couple of hours. “People really do dive into very intimate and private ideas, partly because they might not see each other again,” says Quinn. He adds that “sometimes the dialogue does continue, and people email each other weeks later, saying they’ve just thought of an answer to that question.”