Discovered the way good things should be: by accident, on a Wednesday lunchtime stroll that got pleasantly out of hand at Sissi Sound. We were drawn to the sleeve on and ABC justified the impulse. It’s Park Hye Jin at her clearest: hypnotic, unbothered, and personal. It opens with a pulse that feels half-asleep, half-aware - a beat that doesn’t necessarily ask to be danced to, more to be understood. 

ABC is in English, but the rest of Park Hye Jin’s debut EP If U Want It (2018) drifts between English and Korean. The emotion doesn’t need translation. If Peggy Gou throws the party, Park Hye Jin is the cooler, less commercial sister who scores what comes after.

A ballet dancer takes the stage alone: blue shorts, microphone in hand, discipline meeting desire head-on. In Fifth Position, François-Eloi Lavignac - a former Vienna State Ballet soloist - turns classical technique into autobiography, tracing how ambition, craving, and seduction share the same muscle memory. It’s ballet as confession: a fight between perfection and pleasure, between wanting and composure..

When: 12th, 13th and 14th at studio brut, Zieglergasse 25, 1070, Wien.

While we normally suggest a cinema screening here, next week we’re staying in, inviting friends over and firing up the projector instead. And we recommend you do the same. 

Our pick: Heavenly Creatures, Peter Jackson’s first film before the orcs, before the Oscars. Based on a true story, the 1954 Parker-Hulme case in Christchurch, it follows two teenage girls whose friendship became so consuming it built its own world -  whose forbidden love grows so intense it creates its own imagined world - one vivid enough to justify, fatally, their escape from reality.

We caught the opening of Kata Oelschlägel’s Versöhnung at the Nitsch Foundation last week: part performance, part installation, all immaculate. Her materials - fabric, thread, the body itself: trace what remains when an action ends rather than when it peaks.

Her next performance, Sewn Together (Thursday, 13 November 2025, 18:30), pushes that logic further. Two bodies: the artist’s and that of a male performer will be literally stitched together. Threads draw lines across skin, binding arms and legs, a fragile network of body and fiber. Movement begins tentatively, testing the new anatomy: every gesture creates tension, every shift threatens to undo what’s been made.

The seams tear gradually, not dramatically - separation becomes a consequence of motion rather than its failure. What remains is a meditation on intimacy, endurance, and the quiet violence of connection.

By mid-November in Vienna, you can smell truffle long before you see it - a reliable sign the season has begun. 15 November, Edlingers Tempel: Vienna’s first Truffle Market - where experts and enthusiasts gather to worship the most coveted fungus on the menu.

Behind the market: truffle specialists Richard Poltnig and Filip Franjicevic, alongside hosts Thomas Edlinger and Wolfgang Hetzel - the kind of people who treat fungi with near-religious reverence (hence hosting in a temple “Tempel”). Expect competitions over who can tell a Piedmontese from a Périgord by scent alone, and stories that start with “In Alba…”

When: 15th of November 2025 - Praterstraße 56, 1020 Wien

It started, as many good stories in Austria do, with something closing. When the Falb Inn shut its doors after forty-four years: and with it, the Konfrontationen jazz festival - most people sighed, said schade, and moved on. Yannik didn’t. His mother’s family is from Nickelsdorf, which partly explains his loyalty and entirely his stubbornness.

Yannik is a friend of Heimat and an even better friend of hedonism, which makes sense why he doesn’t let things end. Together with his partner and bar manager Johanna, and chef-curator Jürgen (of Mafia Tabak), he made the lights come back on - the type of decision that starts as a passion project and accidentally ends up full-time. Well, it demands to be, but Yannik has several other projects dividing his time. Send him thoughts and prayers.

This week (10–11 November), the house serves its Martinigansl by Mafia Tabak, better known as artist and chef Jürgen Fetz. Remember, the only correct way to start your meal there is with our lovely Viktoria’s Schödl Pet Nat.

A publicly available photo just didn’t feel right for Yannik, so we dug through our archives and found this 2017 gem for you. We found some others that should absolutely stay locked in the archive.

Expect Austria’s heavy hitters - Gut Oggau, Claus Preisinger, Christian Tschida, rennersistas alongside cult favourites from Italy, France, and beyond: Matassa, Arianna Occhipinti, Barbacan, and Viteadovest among them. Proof that extended skin contact builds chemistry, in grapes and otherwise. 

When it comes to orange wine - we’ve long since crossed over from curious to converted, and yes, we know what that makes us.

Takes place on 14–15 November 2025 at Reaktor, Geblergasse 36–40, 1170 Wien.Tickets start at €45 (one day) or €80 (two days).

Blame this one for our ongoing affair with orange wine. After Grau Freiheit, a crisp but well behaved New Zealand Sauvignon never quite tasted the same... A blend of Pinot Gris, Chardonnay, and Pinot Blanc left to misbehave - cloudy, complex, and all the better for it. It smells like stone fruit, tastes like late afternoon plans.

Meinklang Hofladen is a small grocery, bakery attached to their restaurant - shelves of natural wine, grains, vegetables, and cheese - all from their biodynamic farm near the Hungarian border, where the cows seem to have cracked the work-life balance. Very Vienna of them.

It’s all great until you realise you’ve spent €70 and somehow only bought salt in chic packaging (which you’ll decant into your ceramic pinch pot anyway), a wedge of cheese and six oddly shaped cucumbers. Still, it’s hard to hold a grudge against good taste. So we will be back regularly.

Where: Margaretenstraße 58, 1050 Wien

What used to be Vienna’s tiniest best restaurant, Loup Garou, just celebrated its first birthday as Bar Louu. They swapped plates for playlists - and it’s working. Rumour it a few pop-ups are in the works; we’ll keep you posted.

This adorable little wine bar in the 7th district - which we’d very much like to keep a secret between us - is perfectly located across the street from Berliner Döner. You know, that once-viral kebab spot in Vienna. So if you happen to look a little too deep into one of their many cocktails, or try one too many of their wines, you won’t have to go far for your midnight sober-me-up snack.

Where: Ziegerlgasse 38, Open Tue-Sa from 16.00

Multifaceted and surprising at every turn, the Mochi crew do a lot of things well: highbrow, lowbrow, and the kind of fusions that shouldn’t work but do. They already have their own page in our little black book of where to eat; Chicken Karate feels like the one they made for nights without a plan - the best kind if you ask us. 

Fried chicken, but make it organised: crisp, salty, and slightly addictive in that way that lessens the appeal of carefully plated food meals. The menu’s short, the sauces are loud. Go hungry, bring someone who snacks at your pace, and don’t ask how much soy is too much. The beer list reminded us that beer deserves a second chance.

Where: am Vorgartenmarkt, 1020, Vienna, Austria (no reservation required)

Every year, the same horror: Halloween isn’t even cold yet, and already the first Christmas markets have opened their little huts in Vienna. Soon the streets will smell of candied almonds and Lebkuchen, while all we really want is one more week of quiet and peace before the actual Christmas horror begins. Instead, we get a constant reminder that we’re already running behind schedule during the most wonderful time of the year.

The only recommendation? Honestly, barricade yourself inside, close the blinds, finish your Halloween sweets, and watch a good movie. Not a Christmas Hallmark one, where the busy businesswoman returns to her hometown and finds unlikely love with the charming Christmas-tree vendor - no. An actual good movie.

Preferably one where Santa fulfils our collective fantasy of slashing his way through the crazy Christmas crowds (the CCC) you’ll soon find on Kärntnerstraße or Mariahilferstraße, as everyone desperately searches for the last perfect present on the high street. Or one where he goes on a killing spree after that dreadful Christmas dinner, when you’ve spent too much time between your own family and the in-laws.

Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984) will make your anti-Christmas dreams come true and de-stress you before you have to set foot in one of Vienna’s 20-plus official Christmas markets for the first time. And it’ll also leave you wanting more of - how do we put this - one very good-looking killer Santa.

Dear Santa, we were naughty.

Seneca wrote On the Shortness of Life two thousand years ago to tell us to slow down. We’re still scheduling time to agree with him. His essays remind us that the problem isn’t how little time we have, but how much of it we waste. Seneca doesn’t argue against pleasure; he argues for presence. Read it as a reminder that refinement of thought begins with refinement of time. Best paired with a quiet night in and a glass or two of Grau Freihet we reccomended earlier.

See you next week,

H