A small room on Franziskanerplatz
Kleines Café occupies a narrow space at Franziskanerplatz 3, in Vienna's first district, facing the square's fountain and the Franciscan church that gives both the square and the café their name. Unlike Vienna's grand nineteenth-century coffee houses, it is a twentieth-century creation, but one built specifically to carry forward the city's Kaffeehaus tradition, recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, in a much smaller format than the grand nineteenth-century houses most associated with that tradition, such as Café Central or Café Sperl.
Hermann Czech's design
The café's interior is the work of the architect Hermann Czech, who developed it in stages: the lower section was completed in 1970, an upper section was added in 1973-74, and a distinctive floor treatment, featuring downward-pointing gravestone-like forms set into the lower room, was installed in 1977, with washroom facilities added in 1985, a piecemeal building process that mirrors how many older Viennese cafés were themselves altered and extended over decades rather than built complete from the outset. The design, spread across two floors with separate entrances plus outdoor tables on the square in warmer months, is considered an influential example of how Vienna's café tradition was reinterpreted through modernist design in the later twentieth century, at a scale far smaller than the grand houses it nonetheless draws on for atmosphere.
A gathering place in miniature
Despite its small scale, Kleines Café has functioned much like Vienna's larger coffee houses: an informal meeting point for students, artists and passers-by, and a place where conversation and reading are treated as central to the experience as the coffee itself. Its long, bench-lined room encourages the kind of extended, unhurried sitting associated with the Kaffeehaus tradition generally, compressed into an intimate setting rather than a grand hall. The café's small footprint means that, unlike the larger Viennese houses with their newspaper racks and billiard rooms, its atmosphere depends almost entirely on the proximity of other guests and the architecture itself.
Kleines Café today
The café gained wider recognition as a filming location for the 1995 film 'Before Sunrise', in which the two leads spend part of a night wandering Vienna; its owner, the Austrian actor Hanno Pöschl, appeared in the production, a rare instance of a real café owner playing a role in a film shot on his own premises. It continues to operate today from the same premises on Franziskanerplatz, offering both indoor seating within Czech's original design and outdoor tables on the square, and remains a reference point for discussions of Vienna's café architecture in the late twentieth century, cited alongside Czech's other Viennese interiors as an example of restrained, site-specific design rather than a fixed historical style borrowed wholesale from the nineteenth century.