Einspänner

The Einspänner is one of the Viennese coffee house’s best-known drinks: strong black coffee, called Mokka in Vienna and usually made as a single or double espresso today, served in a glass with a generous cap of whipped cream. The glass – rather than a cup – is part of its identity.

The idea is contrast. You don’t stir it: you drink the hot, strong coffee through the cool, soft cream, so each sip is both bitter and rich. The cream also keeps the coffee warm underneath, which is the practical reason usually given for the drink’s existence.

In Vienna you will find it on the menu of the traditional coffee houses alongside the Melange and the Verlängerter, often served on a small tray with a glass of water. In the 2020s it has also become a favourite in South Korean cafés, where cream-topped coffees inspired by the Einspänner are now popular – and from there in Korean-style cafés abroad.

Einspänner is German for a carriage pulled by a single horse, and the drink is named after the one-horse cabs common in 19th-century Vienna. It is traditionally said to have been a drink for the cab drivers: the cream insulated the coffee so it stayed warm while they waited for fares on cold days, and some accounts add that it helped stop the coffee spilling on bumpy rides. These are traditional explanations rather than documented history, but the link to Vienna’s carriage drivers is widely accepted.

Over time the drink became popular well beyond the cab drivers and a fixture of Vienna’s coffee houses. In the 2020s it found a second home in South Korea, where it is cited as the forerunner of a wave of cream-topped coffees, and Korean-style cafés have since helped popularise it in the United States.