Salzburg's First Coffeehouse
Café Tomaselli traces its origins to the year 1700, when the Frenchman Johann Fontaine received official permission to open Salzburg's first coffee establishment, serving chocolate, tea and coffee at a time when such drinks were still a novelty north of the Alps. Fontaine's business opened in the Goldgasse and functioned as much as a student meeting place as a coffeehouse in the modern sense. For years the café's own facade carried the date 1703, but research by the Salzburg historian Gerhard Ammerer established 1700 as the correct founding year, tracing the business back through its succession of owners.
The coffeehouse changed hands several times before Anton Staiger, who also served as court chamberlain to Archbishop Sigismund III, acquired the coffee rights in 1764 and moved the business to its present address on the Alter Markt, in the shadow of Salzburg's cathedral and archiepiscopal residence. Under Staiger it developed into a more refined establishment catering to Salzburg's upper middle class, and it was this coffeehouse that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart himself is known to have frequented during his years in the city, before his eventual departure for Vienna.
The Tomaselli Family
The café took its current name in 1852, when the pastry maker Carl Tomaselli bought the business, then still known as Café Staiger, and set about establishing it under his own family's name for the first time. Carl was the son of Giuseppe Tomaselli, a tenor who had moved from Milan to Salzburg in 1781 to take up a position as court singer. Since Carl's purchase, the café has stayed in the hands of the Tomaselli family, who today run it in its fifth generation, making it one of the longest continuously family-owned coffeehouses in Austria.
A Mozart Connection
Beyond Mozart's own visits to the earlier Staiger coffeehouse, the building carries a further link to his family: his widow, Constanze Mozart, lived in the same house on the Alter Markt between 1820 and 1826, decades after the composer's death, tying the address to the Mozart family across two generations and giving the café an association that has outlasted several changes of ownership.
Café Tomaselli Today
The café continues to operate from its historic rooms on the Alter Markt, serving coffee and Austrian pastries in an interior that keeps the atmosphere of a traditional Salzburg coffeehouse, with an outdoor terrace opening onto the square during warmer months. Its five-generation family ownership, unusual for a business of its age, sits alongside its status as the oldest coffeehouse in the city, giving it a continuity that few Salzburg institutions can claim. For visitors, it remains a working café first, with its long history, and its links to Mozart and his family, as a backdrop rather than the main attraction.