What Victoria is to a jam sponge, so is Sacher to chocolate cake. It’s a man, a hotel and a cake and, indeed, shorthand for a city. The lines of people outside the Sacher Hotel café in Vienna for chocolate cake with whipped cream on the side are looking for a Viennese experience, like schnitzel, Strauss waltzes or pictures by Klimt. Sacher cake is something you find everywhere, but this one is grounded in a particular place, the Café Sacher. The 360,000 Sacher tortes of varying sizes that are made yearly in its manufactory and dispatched in classy wooden boxes are the exemplars of a formula that has taken over the world.
It’s not every hotel where you get chocolate cake for breakfast
The cake predates the hotel. The story goes that in 1832 Prince Metternich was giving a grand dinner, but his chef, Chambellier, fell ill on the day. Tragic, obviously, but fortunately his underling, one Franz Sacher, aged 16, stepped in, and created a chocolate cake for the guests.
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