STARRED Book Review: The Café With No Name

Reviewed by Lauren Hayataka

A beautifully crafted portrait of a sorrowful dreamer, a café, and the city that surrounds them

Robert Seethaler’s The Café With No Name is a quietly profound novel that captures the pulse of 1960s Vienna through the unassuming yet deeply felt life of Robert Simon.

A dreamer with calloused hands, Simon opens a small café in one of the city’s poorest districts, unknowingly creating a refuge for the lost, lonely souls who pass through his doors. In Seethaler’s hands, the café becomes more than a setting—it is a living thing, expanding and contracting with the rhythms of the city and its people, a place where the scent of hot punch mingles with cigarette smoke and the heady weight of change. 

At the novel’s heart is Simon himself, a man shaped by war and loss yet filled with an unshakeable, if unspoken, yearning for connection. Raised in an orphanage after losing his parents, Simon is terribly practical, hardworking, and earnest to a fault. And yet, despite his pragmatic approach to life, there is something deeply romantic about him.

His decision to take over the run-down market café is less a calculated business move than an act of defiance against a world that has always dictated his circumstances. Unable to come up with a name, he and the neighborhood butcher decide it needs none. After all, everyone already knows where to go.

Seethaler’s prose is deceptively simple, filled with exquisite yet simple details that illuminate the world of the café. The novel moves through intimate and grand moments: the widow’s quiet snores from the next room, the single black shoe left behind the counter, and the soft clink of coins in Simon’s pocket as he wipes down the bar. Through his eyes, we see Vienna in transition, where war-torn streets are slowly smoothed over with prosperity, where modernity arrives not with fanfare but in subtle shifts: the growing presence of automation; the construction of the subway; the way that time, despite its movement, seems to leave people much the same.

The café becomes a gathering place for an eclectic cast of characters, each bringing their histories, burdens, and quiet hopes.

There is Mila Szabica, the diligent seamstress with permanently reddened hands, whose reliability anchors the café’s ever-changing landscape.

There is René Wurm, the hulking Heumarkt wrestler who falls hopelessly in love with her, so distracted by his longing that he nearly has his ribs broken in the ring.

There is Heide Bartholome, the cheesemonger whose dramatic outbursts over her lover’s infidelities unfold with operatic intensity, her emotions spilling into the marketplace like an overturned cart of cabbages.

And there is the widow, a quiet yet constant presence in Simon’s life, whose slow decline into forgetfulness underscores his dedication to her. Simon will leave neither the widow nor his café. 

Years pass in short, fluid chapters, carrying with them a sense of inevitability and loss. Worries replace reckless eagerness, and dreams take a quieter, more cautious form. Simon longs for love, not just for its warmth but for the ache it brings. He is not an awkward figure who shies away from women; rather, he is drawn to them, if only because of how different they are from himself.

Yet love remains elusive—first in the mercurial, unpredictable Jascha, a woman as fleeting as a half-remembered dream, and later in his own growing inability to understand the women who drift in and out of his life. Meanwhile, the café’s patrons grow older, but their routines remain unchanged, reinforcing the novel’s central theme: that no matter how much time passes, certain things—loneliness, longing, the need for connection—endure.

Seethaler’s restraint is part of what makes The Café With No Name so deeply affecting. Moments of joy—a noisy, blissful wedding; the first rush of customers drawn in by the widow’s secret hot punch recipe—are tempered by inevitable sorrow. The loss of a child. A market fire. The slow, creeping losses accumulate not in dramatic tragedy but in the quiet erosion of time.

And yet, despite this melancholy, there is something enduringly beautiful in Simon’s world—a beauty found in the small things, in the warmth of a well-worn space, in the routine of polishing stove plates and wiping down counters, in the knowledge that, for a time, the café is a home to those who need it.

In the end, The Café With No Name is less about a place than the people who lingered at its doorway, leaving behind only the faintest traces of their existence. Seethaler’s novel lingers like the scent of coffee in the air—warm, fleeting, and profoundly human.

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