The land of Starbucks gets taste of Vienna

By Jeremy Grant

This week's capture of the California governorship by Arnold Schwarzenegger, Hollywood muscle man and native Austrian, may have been impressive but a subtler Austrian conquest is under way in the US.

Next month marks the first anniversary of the opening of the first coffee house in the country by Julius Meinl, a coffee roaster founded in Vienna in 1862. The location is an affluent residential area in northern Chicago, America's third largest city. It is a bold move for a company that not only is new to doing business in the US but is also entering a market crowded with coffee chains, led by the largest of all, Starbucks.

But the Meinl café has been packed since it opened in a new building on the site of a former Amoco petrol station in Chicago's old German quarter. That may be because the experience is quite unlike that in a high street coffee chain.

First, the interior is designed to replicate the look and feel of one of Vienna's 1,900 or so existing coffee houses, from the wood-panelled walls to the stacks of vacuum-packed Julius Meinl coffee bags and fruit jams, displayed in wooden shelves. Historic photographs of former Meinl coffee houses dot the walls. Newspapers, including Austrian dailies, are available - bound to wooden poles, European style.

Second, the coffee is served in porcelain, rather than in disposable paper cups. It is also made with filtered water, to remove any chlorine from the city's water, which is pumped from Lake Michigan. And there is an extensive menu of Austrian pastries as well as sandwiches and soups. The idea is to linger, Vienna-style, and chat.

For those with dogs, the café even provides water bowls outside the entrance.

Thomas Meinl, great-grandson of the company's founder - it is still family run - says the choice of Chicago rather than a location on the US east or west coast reflected a perception that the city, with its deep European roots, would be more open to the concept of a central European coffee shop. There are few Austrians in Chicago (about 3,000 are registered as such, says the city's Austrian Consulate General). But about 17 per cent of Chicagoans can trace their ancestry to Germany, and Chicago's Polish community is the largest outside Warsaw.

Mr Meinl says: "New York is, of course, more influenced by Europe but Chicago is very European, as well as being more 'real America' than the east or west coast. People have been less threatened by Europe on the east coast and by Asia in the west; they're more European and more open to accepting the new kid on the block."

In addition, the business culture in the US has helped. "New ideas are given a chance and you don't have the controls and limits and officialdom that you have here [in Austria] and Germany and other parts of Europe," he says. "It's somehow a more flexible society."

Julius Meinl's recent history in Europe, by contrast, has been one of contraction. The company was a household name across central Europe in the early part of the past century, with a network of about 1,000 shops specialising in coffee but also selling delicatessen, through franchise arrangements from Serbia, Hungary, Italy and Austria. Mr Meinl says many of the venues became unsuitable because "costs got on top of us and a lot of the locations were where you couldn't park"

. About 15 years ago, the company reverted to its original specialisation, coffee roasting, though it maintains a flagship delicatessen on the Graben, a fashionable street in central Vienna.

Mr Meinl says the company is unlikely to expand rapidly beyond Chicago but will grow gradually by developing a "cluster" of coffee shops in the city before moving elsewhere in the US.

There appears to be more of an opportunity in coffee roasting. Julius Meinl recently started a wholesale coffee business in Chicago, selling to hotels and other bulk buyers. The move harks back to the company's earliest days when it specialised in selling freshly roasted coffee.

The coffee served at the company's Chicago café is, as is typical of most Meinl coffees, a milder roast than coffee sold by chains such as Starbucks. Steve Farley, a 34-year-old former sales executive and one of Meinl's US partners in the Chicago venture, says this makes for a smoother taste.

"It does differentiate itself from the coffee providers at other outlets in the US," he says.

With Starbucks having opened its first store in Vienna in 2001, in a challenge to Austrian palates, it seems appropriate that American coffee drinkers are being given the opportunity to taste one of the most venerated coffee roasts in Europe in their own back yard.