Tichy is already open!

One of my deepest memories from my first visit to Vienna was the ice cream on the last stop of the red line U1 of Vienna’s subway – Reumannplatz. It is because the strawberry ice cream tasted exactly like strawberries, mango like mango and bilberry ice cream like bilberries and even coloured your teeth and tongue.

Viennese are joking that their three Ice Saints are not St. Boniface, St. Pancras and St. Servatius but Bortolotti, Zanoni and Tichy. Paolo Bortolotti is located on Vienna’s main shopping street – Mariahilfer Strasse, Zanoni&Zanoni on Am Lugeck 7 or Am Graben 19. Tichy has his „Palais de Glace“ on Reumannplatz. It is easy to find, there is a park where everybody is licking ice cream. Tichy opens his shop around the middle of March – with this opening the Viennese know that the spring has already arrived!

Kurt Tichy and his wife Marianne started to sell ice cream in 1952 with their three-wheel ice cream van. Just three years later they moved to the building in the 10^th district where they have remained ever since. A lot of new ice cream ideas were created here, the most successful invented in 1967: the ice-apricot-dumplings which have been considered appropriate for patenting. Only Tichy has the right to call them „Eismarillenknödel“. They are made from very fine vanilla ice cream, filled with apricot puree and rolled in ground roasted hazelnuts. Every year they sell almost 1 million of them! And do you want to know how much ice cream they produce? In the summer months 3.000 liters per day!!! The shop assistants (all of them female) in pink-white uniforms are very busy – every day till the end of September when the ice cream season ends and the shop closes. After that, all of them take their holiday. And what does the ice cream man Kurt Tichy Jun., who leads the company since his fathers‘ death, do in the winter? As he once said in an interview, he writes books and goes fishing.

There are 15 – 17 sorts of ice cream at Tichy. If they offer the elder ice cream you should definitely try it! In addition to the apricot dumplings, there are also ice-raspberry-dumplings rolled in poppy seeds or snowballs made from ice cream and whisked egg whites. I personally recommend giving them a few minutes rest before eating. But there are also vanilla ice cream spaghetti with candied fruits, nuts and raspberry sauce, different ice cream cakes and other specialties. You can enjoy them on a small terrace or inside at the Palais de Glace, where the ambience is very classy with a touch of history and traditional Viennese elegance.