I received warning and, finally, confirmation that the wonderful coffee of Mocca Club will soon be gone.

I have no idea of the reasons, as it seemed fairly popular, but I can confess to my lack of support. Despite the fact that the Mocca Club served the best coffee in Vienna, I just couldn’t make myself go there very often. The reason: smoking.

I simply can’t tolerate hanging out in smoke-filled rooms anymore, so it was a bit of heaven and hell in the same package for me. I could drink the best coffee in Vienna while sucking down smoke from my fellow gormandizers, but I’d leave the place smelling like I’d been out for a night of drinking. I rarely chose to do that.

My wife’s theory for the Mocca Club’s demise is that the cafe was just too diverse in its offerings. There were simply too many things to manage. Chocolate fountains at brunch, cigar storage, kitchen management, 30 or 40 types of coffee—it was a very ambitious spread for a fledgling operation. That may be.

But maybe it’s just that the “new Vienna”—the one with rising rents, market value apartments, pressure from chain stores, and a strong culture of epicurean conservatism just simply can’t support an operation that seeks to elevate coffee beyond something that you do while smoking and reading to a true culinary experience. Let’s be honest: the ultra premium coffee market is small to begin with. To pull it off, you need a city like Portland or Chicago with lots of underemployed, obsessive nascent coffee nerds to pump it out and an affluent yuppie population to suck it up.

A new operation will open in place of Mocca Club, but as Michael says, “mal sehen.”

In the meantime, the tragic landscape endures.