Das Kaffeehaus

I've never been to Vienna, though the Austrian National Tourist Office once bussed a load of us to Castlemaine to promote Vienna's coffeehouse culture by hosting a morning of kleiner mokka and apfelstrudel at Coffee Basics, a cafe and roastery in the town's old hospital run by an Austrian couple who had moved to the goldfields in the late 1980s.

The couple, Elna Schaerf Trauner and Edmund Schaerf, have wiener melange (that's Vienna flat white) running in their veins. Relatives of Edmund run Daniel Moser, one of Vienna's original coffeehouses, and that's where Edmund learned the roasting trade and met Elna, who was making coffee.

The couple's dream was to open a grand Viennese-style coffeehouse in Castlemaine. They had their eye on the red-brick chimney that towers above the old Castlemaine Woollen Mill, which is being revived by local business groups and the council as a food and drink precinct.

Three years after that bus trip, Coffee Basics' roasters are installed in the boiler room at the bottom of the chimney, and the Viennese-style coffeehouse dream is a rather marvellous reality at the front of the old mill.

The big room with tall windows on two sides is dominated by a tear-drop chandelier that hangs above a circular gold-leather banquette. Marble-topped tables and cafe chairs are dotted around a space that could double as a ballroom if the furniture were cleared and the Strauss turned up to 11.

Period paintings and gilt-framed mirrors hang above red leather banquettes along one wall: this is as close to grand as Castlemaine has got since about 1856.

The menu is based on typical Vienna coffeehouse food, Elna says: simple, tasty central European dishes that don't appear on most Melbourne cafe menus.

There's a big breakfast of bread, butter, cold cuts, cheese, soft-boiled egg and a coffee; a baked quark souffle with stewed prunes; and millet porridge with poached pears.

Fiaker goulash is a splodge of the familiar Hungarian beef stew, slow-cooked with lots of paprika and onion, and served with a Viennese frankfurter, a fried egg and a pickled gherkin. It's a hearty dish that was originally meant to keep Vienna's fiaker (carriage) drivers warm while they were waiting in the snow.

The goulash (Austro-Hungary, right?) also appears for lunch, a decent bowlful with a big doughy, bready dumpling island in the middle. Lunch mains run to a variety of schnitzels (traditional Viennese veal, chicken and even kangaroo), but the dish I would be going back for is something from the wurstel (sausages) menu.

The sausages come from Andrew's Choice in Yarraville, and they are quality snags. Traditional wiener are pork with a little white pepper, the kransky is coarser in texture with aged cheese added, and the polnische hochzeit is porky double-smoked Polish wedding sausage.

The debreziner​ is two fat, smoky boiled pork sausages with a hit of paprika and a little chilli bite. The full serve comes with a pot of sweet pickled red cabbage and a more savoury sauerkraut, mustard and bread, and it makes a just-right lunch.

The coffee menu is daunting. You could for the grosser mokka – a double-shot espresso – but you can also have espresso coffee with milk or cream, and in a variety of Viennese specialties: a single shot with condensed milk, maybe, a double shot with egg yolk, honey and brandy, or even the unusual katerkaffe: a double espresso sweetened with lemon-infused sugar cubes.

Do … try the Sachertorte. Or the Linzertorte
Don't … miss the schnappicino: a cappuccino with butterscotch schnapps
Dish … debreciner sausage
Vibe Central Europe meets central Victoria