'Welcome Home': Inside Vienna's First Maid Café

This post first appeared on Broadly Germany.

Maid cafés climbed to popularity around the turn of the century in Japan. Now you can find cafés of an infinite variety in the country—one in Tokyo will employ staff dressed up as Hello Kitty; another will dress them up as schoolgirls. They've even started offering extra services, like foot massages. But the basic principle remains: maid cafés are coffeehouses where you're waited on hand and foot by people in maid or butler uniforms.

Maid cafés have also slowly taken hold in Europe. In Germany, one-off maid cafés can be spotted at comic book and manga conventions. In Austria, Maid Café Vienna isn't satisfied with serving tea to convention geeks—they want to open a permanent café based on the Japanese model, but with unmistakably Viennese elements. To raise money, they've opened pop-up cafés at irregular intervals. This time, the event is taking place in Café Benedikt, right next to the Rochusmarkt in Vienna's third district.

I've hardly finished sitting down when Usagi hands me the menu. The establishment's rules are listed on the back of it: Pictures of the maids are forbidden, unless you beat them at a game. (It's customary in maid cafés for the maids to play parlour games with their guests to be able to spend time together with them.) Touching is completely forbidden and will result in you being immediately banned from the establishment. To make sure that people don't come just to look, there's a bar minimum and a cover fee of five euros.

But you actually don't get the feeling that any rude gawkers are around here. The majority of the other guests are in their early 20s or even younger, so they're about the same age as the personnel. Judging from their clothes, they're all manga or anime fans; they're not coming here just for the good service—they're here to get a whiff of Japanese pop culture, thousands of miles away from Tokyo.

The menu features a typical Viennese teatime treats, but there's also omuraisu (a kind of rice omelette) and onigiri. Confused, I order a café latte and play a card game with a maid while I wait. When I actually win the game, a butler comes around the corner with a camera and snaps a picture of us. The next table over, someone wins a quick game of "rock, paper, scissors" and also gets to pose for a picture. Usagi gets up to get my café latte and then leaves me alone to enjoy my drink.

For traditionally grumpy Viennese, the concept of a maid café may be a bit tough to comprehend. But the idea is that the staff aren't just in costume while serving—they're also acting out the role of a maid. It's a little luxury that you can indulge in Tokyo from time to time. Bonus: the maids are usually young, the skirts are short, and their cleavage is cut low. The laws governing alcohol and sex work are quite strict in Japan and have to be skilfully bypassed unless you don't want to open your café in the middle of the red light district.

Maid Café Vienna founder Nicole Ziener explains that these pop up events are more difficult than they seem. "It's hard to find a coffee house in Vienna that you can rent out for a day. It's also really hard to sew all the maids' costumes. It's really important to us that each dress is one of a kind and is tailored to the maid who wears it." During the café's opening hours, you can find Ziener—a trained chef—in the kitchen making panda toast by the dozen (white bread with a panda face burnt into the middle). She serves it with cheese and ham, Austrian style.

Men don't just visit the café—they also serve in it. "We have six male members in the club [and] three of them work as butlers at almost every event." She adds they've been almost overrun with applications from maids interested in working at the events. In fact, many people would rather work at the events than just be a guest in the café. But it isn't possible for organizational reasons to accept every application.

As for the dresses, Ziener explains: "Why don't make the cut of the skirt too short and the cut of the top too low on purpose. We don't want the outfits to focus on the sexual. And on top of that, we want the maids to feel good in them."

There isn't a network among the maid cafés in Europe, Nicole says. It's a small and fiercely competitive market. Whoever gets there first, wins. Apparently there was something going on in Brno in the Czech Republic, but any records of this have vanished from the internet. Even Germany can't say that it has a permanent maid café. The staffing costs are so high because of the time-intensive service, which can drive away anyone except the most devoted café owner.

After finishing my coffee, I say goodbye to Usagi and pay my bill, including the cover fee. As a thank you, they give me a little gift, packed in an origami box. I've never experienced this kind of treatment before; Viennese coffee houses are legendary for the unfriendliness of their waitressing staff. I'll be there for the next pop up event—even if I'm not exactly sure if that's because of my fascination with the costumes or the excellent service.