Top Gastronomy at Viennese places
of Metamorphosis—from Disco to Remise

Potatoes with an edible peel made of gray clay are served in a disco ball, next to it is a miniature “after-work toast” on a small vinyl record, and the soup can be sipped from a riveted metal cup. Details like these point to the respective location at every Viennese pop-up of the Austrian Taubenkobel. This year, the team from the Burgenland restaurant, which has been one of the best in the country for decades and was named the “Coolest Place to Eat” by Forbes in 2016, has once again moved to yet another location in the capital for the pre-Christmas period. 

Fine dining to disco beats is now on offer in the city-center Volksgarten discotheque. This year’s guest appearance is called Diskokobel—playing with the name of the original establishment (Taubenkobel means dovecote) is part of the experience every year. 

When Taubenkobel took over an old Mercedes workshop in 2022, the pop-up restaurant was christened Schraubenkobel, (screw or bolt cote) while a disused streetcar remise became the Lokvogel (a play on words with Lok as short for locomotive, and the bird (Vogel) from the dovecote (Taubenkobel) to form the German word used for bird hunting decoys) restaurant four years earlier. The coach house, or remise, on one of the busiest city streets in Europe was perhaps the most spectacular location yet—the guests dined in the high, almost miraculously heated old industrial hall directly on rails, with a discarded vintage car serving as a smoking compartment. Even die-hard Viennese were amazed at what is possible in their city. The brick building is meanwhile used as a hall for gastro markets. 

For that, too, has been part of the principle so far: Thanks to their contacts in the real estate industry, the Taubenkobel restaurateur couple Barbara Eselböck and Alain Weissgerber always found places that were lying fallow at the time, sometimes truly lost spaces, and converted them according to their thematically stringent pop-ups. The former main post office, for example, the “imperial-royal post directorate” just a few minutes’ walk from St. Stephen’s Cathedral, functioned as pop-up restaurant Brieftaubenkobel in 2017, complete with a large-scale Emperor Franz Joseph on the wall and masses of gold stucco; the building was then bought by two investor groups with the aim of transforming it into a clean office-cum-residential-hotel complex.

The Taubenkobel pop-ups are a project that is probably unparalleled internationally. Not only because of the works of art, which can be experienced in all locations thanks to a cooperation with a Viennese gallery, but also because of the enormous personal commitment of the host couple and their team. There tends to be little sleep during these months, and it can happen that Barbara Eselböck answers a phone call while she is standing on a ladder unscrewing light bulbs, “These were too bright for me,” from a chandelier.