Last year, Vienna announced plans to become carbon neutral by 2040, beating the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement by 10 years. Hyperlocal food, through urban farming and sustainable agriculture, will play a major role in making it happen. Vienna has nearly 5,000 acres of fields and vineyards within its city limits, and it's adding more as the city educates and supports local growers in reducing their ecological footprints. The benefits are most visible in Vienna's restaurants, where fresh, produce-driven menus are supplanting the traditional meat-heavy dishes associated with the city.
At the bright, vegetarian Tian, a tasting-menu standout is the oven-braised local celeriac “tartlets” filled with pear, celery, and juniper, all of which were grown within 40 miles. This approach helped the restaurant earn a Michelin Green Star for sustainable gastronomy last year. Chef de cuisine Paul Ivić wants diners to view sustainability not as a trend but as a mindset. “Our eating habits affect our environment, our health, our social life,” he says. “As gastronomists, it's our responsibility to make a difference.”
A similar appreciation for Vienna's bounty pervades Alma, a gastrothèque and wine bar in the laid-back Wieden district. The changing menu includes carrot-almond-apricot tagine and smoked trout served with house-fermented crème fraîche, among other dishes made fresh each day. Alma's biodynamic local-wine list includes a Gemischter Satz from Fuchs-Steinklammer, a winery in southern Vienna whose grapes benefit from the area's clay-heavy soil.
Smaller producers are finding their own ways to create sustainable solutions. Pioneering urban-agriculture collective Hut & Stiel takes discarded grounds from the city's coffeehouses and mixes them with mycelium to grow oyster mushrooms, which it sells to both restaurants and consumers. At Gugumuck Wiener Schnecken Manufaktur—which translates, literally, to “Viennese snail factory”—farmer Andreas Gugumuck is building on the mollusk's long history in Austrian cuisine to promote a low-impact, high-protein alternative to meat. “We are living a circular flow,” Gugumuck says, explaining how snails, vegetables, and herbs are all cultivated on the same land, then sold at markets and the company's bistro. “Working sustainably with nature has nothing to do with giving up something you like,” Ivić says. “It's about changing habits to improve our environment, planet, and society.”
This article appeared in the January/February 2023 issue of Condé Nast Traveler. Subscribe to the magazine here. Vienna is one of our Best Places to Go in 2023.
