Meet the Visionary Behind The Hip Vienna Café Fett + Zucker Café Eva-Maria Trimmel
by Heather Cassell
What does one do when they are bored with their job? How about open a café?
That’s what Eva-Maria Trimmel did when she opened Fett + Zucker Café in 2011.
Bored with her job as an architect and with no culinary experience, she delved into the café world with one purpose: an afternoon hangout in a queer-friendly place.
“I was missing places … where you can hang out in the afternoon … and meet queer people and alternative people,” Eva-Maria, 43, told Girls That Roam over a cup of melange and cake at Fett + Zucker, translated means fat and sugar. “Nobody else did it, so I did it myself.”
She loves Vienna’s vibrant queer-feminist scene.
“Vienna has a vivid queer scene and a lot of queer art projects are going on,” she said. “The queer feminist community its really active.”
Some of Eva-Maria’s favorite places to go when she’s not at Fett + Zucker are the RosaLilaTürkis Villa, the city’s queer center, and going to events at Marea Alta and Club mode.mode in Elektro Gönner.
She transformed the former record shop in Leopoldstadt, Vienna’s second district, with help from her friends to create what she envisioned would attract queer feminist and the community around her.
It instantly became a hip café frequented by locals, travelers, and simply shoppers seeking a break from perusing the stalls at the nearby Karmelitermarkt.
The market served as her first publicity. At the time, the neighborhood was emerging as a hipster enclave for artists, queers and women, like herself, seeking inexpensive rent and an escape from the mainstream. They found it in the Old Jewish Quarter, which was becoming a mashup of immigrants and Orthodox Jews and a new wave of bohemians who transformed the neighborhood.
She didn’t plan on opening the café in her own backyard, but after a year and a half search for the right space she found the café’s current location.
It’s an intimate spot with a front and back room filled with books, magazines, games and fliers of local activist group announcements.
The walls decorated with her friend’s tape artwork signify her architecture background with its clean lines and stark surfaces creating a clean whimsical atmosphere. The café is charming, the service provided by her mostly female staff is warm and friendly, and the coffee and deserts good.
That’s what continued to bring people who simply strolled through the doors from the market when she first opened back to the café. They just kept coming, even as far as across town simply to get her cakes.
Eight years later, the café is still going strong even as the neighborhood has become trendy with new bars, café, restaurants, galleries and shops.
The café is a part of the movement as Vienna transforms itself shedding off the attitudes that kept it stuck in its Imperial and provincial past while retaining the history as it metamorphoses into a modern city.
She loves Vienna’s intimacy that makes it easy to live. However, the city’s provincialism also sends her beyond Austria’s borders during summer and winter breaks in August and Christmas, respectively, when the café closes.
Eva-Maria’s favorite places are where the sea laps at the European continent’s shores in Mallorca and Lesvos.
“I love the sea, therefore Greece, Spain, Italy or the Canary Islands are some of my top destinations,” she said talking about how she simply loves to “flee my every-day life with its obligations.”
She is also attracted to bold cities like Berlin, London, New York, and Paris.
“I want to go to cities like London, Berlin or New York City because they are not as provincial as Vienna and people who don’t look like the average white blonde long-haired female are not getting stared at as much,” she said.
The bottom line is travel changes the “focus of your life even for a short time,” she continued adding that it also inspires her at the cafe.
Fett + Zucker Café is located at Hollandstraße 16, 1020 Vienna, Austria. Phone: +43 699 11660092. Email: . Website: www.fettundzucker.at.
Book your next vacation to Vienna with Girls That Roam Travel. Contact Heather Cassell at Girls That Roam Travel at 415-517-7239 or at .
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