Café Central is usually at the top, or very close to it, of lists of Vienna’s best coffee houses – even on lists of those criticizing its latest renovation as being overdone and robbing the place of decades-old patina. Located in the Palais Festel, it has a high vaulted ceiling and most of the qualities that make Viennese cafés such pleasant places.

Traditionally, Café Central has been the haunt of the intelligentsia and writers. Peter Altenberg, whose paper maché statue is at the entrance, was a Stammgast, as was Leo Trotsky who founded Pravda in Vienna. Communism with style, or simply continuing the Marx-Engels tradition of not getting your own hand dirty?

We had breakfast less than an hour previously but as we were not planning to come to this area again, we simply had to visit Café Central and do our best. A passage through the Palais Festel led us to Café Central Konditorei – although the confectionary also has a number of tables, I fortunately instantly recognized this was the wrong place. (Guidebooks on Vienna without a photo of the interior of Café Central are far and few between.) The real place is at the corner of the palace, and you will know you are there.

Shortly after ten in the morning, the café was not particularly busy but the neat dress of most clientele made us opt for a table closer to the kitchen. The menu is extensive and seems to change according to the time of day. As we were going to only have coffee, we decided to make it something special: I ordered a coffee with cream and a Maria Theresa liqueur (€6.10) while my wife ordered a Türkischer (€5.60), a strong, thick Turkish coffee served in the traditional way. The toddler received a long promised ice cream while the baby was going to munch on his traditional whole-wheat roll that I bought every morning at the small bakery at the station where we changed trams.

How was I to know that the thirteen-month old was going to have a coming-of-age moment? He got restless, as he usually does, when the tuxedo-clad waiter placed our orders on the table. I fortunately took longer than usual to find the placating bread roll. This allowed the waiter to retreat before the baby slung said bread roll three tables far with a scream of "I’ll be damned if I’m going to eat a dry, whole-wheat bread roll in Café Central." The small biscuits that came with the coffee saved the day, as the toddler was defending her ice cream valiantly up to the last drop.

I would love to return to Café Central sans children. Not that they generally cannot behave, but even I would not take them there between 4 and 7pm, when live piano music is played, or after 7:30pm, when the live music is more upbeat.