Leave Room For Cake

Literature does not lack a keen bite from a saccharine delicacy. Between the pages, there is an eager savoring of an indulgent confection that unravels the mind’s locked chamber of memories. The protagonist in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past plunges into an over a million-word of nostalgia upon tasting the tea-soaked madeleine. In Chroniclers of Narnia, the White Witch tempts the naive youth with a cube of pillowy Turkish delight, veiling her greed under the rosy sponge. A wedge of a similarly delectable musing in our mundane existence is the Sacher torte, the most regal of old world cakes, fixated on every flamboyant eatery’s leather-clad menu. And the dome of this marriage between apricot jam and chocolate cake is Vienna’s Hotel Sacher. 

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The story goes that when, in 1832, Prince Metternich was in need of a cake to impress his soirée guests, the task fell onto the lap of a 16-year old pastry apprentice, Franz Sacher. Today, the cake has become a symbol of the palatial Viennese cafe culture, and the hotel anchors an ornate social scene which crescendos when its neighbor Vienna State Opera unveils its annual Opera Ball every February. 

After Franz whisked his cake’s fame into the city’s iconic Cafe Sacher in 1865, his son Eduard expanded the brand into a five-star hotel 11 years later. However, it was none other than the son’s widow Anna, who transformed the locale into a velvet-upholstered epicenter for the free-spirited Weimar era intelligentsia. “Anna had to fight to obtain the permission to run the hotel because it was uncommon for a woman to manage such a business at the time,” says Alexandra Winkler. Today, she is the third-generation owner of the Hotel Sacher brand which also has locations in Salzburg and the Austrian Alps after her great grandfather Hans Gürtler acquired the business when Anna passed in 1930. One of the hotelier matriarch’s many hospitality skills, according to Winkler, was to “bring [the] right crowd together.” A friendship between Gustav Klimt and Anna’s brother helped her attract the café society in melange-soaked get-togethers. Vagabond painters mingled with aristocrats; sopranos and philosophers nibbled on cake. As teeny glasses of schnapps were raised amongst the bohemian and the elite, Belle Époque at its best permeated the smoke-filled air.

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A sign that Anna was expecting a personality into her hotel would be the sight of her with both her hands full. “She had a picture of the guest on one hand for an autograph,” says Winkler, “and her famous tablecloth would be in the other.” Almost two centuries later, the rule has in fact remained unchanged. From Harry Belafonte, Rue McClanahan, and Annie Leibowitz to David Copperfield, Anthony Hopkins, and Jean Paul Gaultier, hundreds of luminaries have signed on the cloth in a green, red, blue, or black marker. Diego Maradona has a note, and so do Karel Appel, Valentino, Hillary Clinton, Kate Moss, and Rick Owens. “It is a unique form of documentation, different than a typical notebook,” explains Winkler. 

Once a cloth reaches its full capacity to hold autographs, the fabric makes its way to an embroider to monumentalize each scribble in thread. The tradition has currently celebrated its sixth tablecloth which was christened by George Clooney and Christine Baranski. The walls that lead to the hotel’s green-colored Grüne Bar exhibit three cloths for the sharp eye: there is a note from Sophia Loren, not far from one by Emma Stone, while Tony Bennett’s signature rests on the same surface with that of Marianne Faithfull’s. The corners are prime estate, but do fancy the joy of scanning each threaded seal in italic.

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The origin of the ritual dates back to Anna’s early years in charge when she was a friend of Katharina Schratt, a stage actress and the girlfriend of the emperor Franz Joseph I. The ruler then was believed to have never stayed at the hotel, so Schratt instead gave a handkerchief signed by her lover as a tribute to her friend. Anna waited little to have it stitched onto a tablecloth with a little crown over the handwriting.

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The challenge now is to exhibit the growing number of tablecloths. “The building wasn’t created as a hotel but it has kept growing over the decades,” says Winkler who tapped French interior designer Pierre-Yves Rochon for a renovation project in 2004. “If I were to rebuild the hotel today, I would make one large wall where I could display all my tablecloths!”

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