Vienna, part 2 - the Naschmarkt

A few days ago I wrote about our recent trip to the city of Vienna, and I described some of the sights we saw and attractions we visited. Now I am going to home-in and give you some detail on my favourite attraction - the Naschmarkt.

The Naschmarkt is an area of the city devoted to the sale of food and drink. It has a huge succession of stalls - some temporary, but mostly permanent- which sell ingredients of every conceivable nature, both local and exotic. The market extends over 1.5km in length, with a triple row of stalls. Two rows sell ingredients, and one row is devoted to restaurants selling prepared food. The market is in a street called Linke Wienzeile, right next to the Kettenbruckengasse U-Bahn station on the U4 Line, so it is very easily accessible.

This is a market frequented by locals and tourists alike. The locals genuinely use it for their everyday shopping, whereas the tourists do what we did - ogle, and take photographs. On the other hand, I suspect that most of the locals don't often eat in the restaurants, but the tourists usually do.

Many of the stalls sell "conventional" fruit and veg - but what fabulous specimens! Every one of them seemed to be in A1 condition.



There were dozens of stalls selling ready-prepared goods (hors d'oeuvres etc), such as tomatoes, peppers, courgettes, dates etc stuffed with cheese, figs, walnuts, prosciutto etc.

These "Birds Nests" seemed to be made of Baklava and decorated with Pistachio "eggs".

One of the least attractive items from my point of view was the Baby Octopus and Calamari stuffed with prawns (I don't eat fish or seafood).

The bread was more to my liking

As was the cheese

I had to steer Jane (who is diabetic) quickly past the mountains of fudge

And the cakes

And the Macaroons

And the honey (with Vanilla; with Pumpkin seeds; with Walnuts, etc)

And the candied fruit

These all make it look as if there was practically nothing that Jane could have eaten, but this was far from true. We were both interested in this stall which sold many different types of oil and vinegar

The owner of this stall was proudly handing out samples of his Tomato vinegar.

The mushrooms looked nice. There were loads of really huge Porcini / Boletus on sale

Lots of herbs too. Most of the common ones, but also plenty of the more obscure ones as well - such as these nettles. (BTW: How many words do you know that include the same letter three times in a row?)

There were dried herbs and spices in profusion

There was a lot of meat and meat products on sale - mainly pork, sausages of various types, and Wiener Schnitzel (Veal escalopes) and even ducks:

And teapots

Several stalls sold growing plants - almost all of them edible, like these chillis

Some of the stall-holders had gone to great lengths to display their wares attractively (No, that is not a live chicken).

All in all, quite the most comprehensive and mouth-watering display of food items I have ever seen. If you are a Foodie, you must NOT visit Vienna without going to the Naschmarkt! I just wish it was local to us so that we could actually buy some of the items we saw.