When we decided to spend part of this summer in Vienna, a milestone birthday trip we've been talking about for years, I started thinking about how to approach the city the right way.

Vienna rewards the obvious things. The Kunsthistorisches Museum. The Staatsoper. The Ringstrasse at dusk.

But if you want to understand the city rather than just see it, there's no better place to start than a coffeehouse.

Vienna's café culture isn't a relic. It's still the way the city thinks. For two centuries, its coffeehouses have been where ideas were argued, newspapers read, chess played, manuscripts written, and, at least one of them, revolutions quietly planned.

UNESCO added Viennese coffeehouse culture to its Intangible Cultural Heritage list in 2011. The Viennese themselves would consider that overdue.

So I called someone who knows the city well.

John Boyer and I were colleagues at the University of Chicago for years. We interacted regularly, and once business was done, I always looked forward to what came next.

Boyer served as Dean of the College for 31 years, the longest tenure in the school's history.

He is also one of the foremost scholars of Habsburg Vienna, the author of several books on the city's political and cultural history, the recipient of the Austrian State Prize for Modern History, and the writer of the definitive history of the University of Chicago itself.

When the university held its alumni weekend a few years ago, they set up a tent in his honor for two days, with a proper Viennese coffee bar and pastries, and called it Café Vienna.

The man knows the city. More to the point, he loves it. Not as a scholar's subject but as a place he keeps going back to.

I asked him one question: which coffeehouse means something to you when you're there?

I expected Café Central. Everyone expects Café Central, the grand vaulted space where Trotsky played chess and Freud argued over coffee, and the whole of turn-of-the-century Vienna seemed to pass through at one point or another. Boyer knows all of that. He's written about that world.

He sent me to Café Frauenhuber instead.

It's on Himmelpfortgasse, "Heaven's Gate Street," tucked off the main pedestrian drag near Stephansdom. No queue. No TikTok presence.

Boyer has logged more hours in Viennese coffeehouses than most people spend in their own living rooms. He goes to Frauenhuber to sit in one of the plush red booths, drink coffee, and work on manuscripts.

Quiet and dignified, he said.

The building has been there since the early 1700s. The café has been serving coffee since 1824, the oldest in Vienna, though it doesn't make much of the claim.

What it does make something of, on a plaque outside, is this: in November 1788, Mozart performed in this room. Beethoven premiered a quintet here in April 1797.

Mozart's last known public appearance was just a few streets away, but this room knew him, too. The first performance of his Requiem, a benefit concert for his widow, took place here two years after his death.

There is, the café notes with some understatement, no other restaurant in the world that can claim to have hosted musical performances by both Mozart and Beethoven.

None of that is why Boyer goes. He goes because it's quiet. Because the booths are comfortable. Because he can think there.

That's what stayed with me after his note. Vienna has no shortage of places loud with history.

Frauenhuber is a place where history is present but not loud, and the people who come regularly prefer it that way. The café earned a reputation for stillness going back to the 19th century, when retired military officers came to play chess in peace.

We'll be there in a few months. I already know where we'll sit.