Phil occupies a long, narrow ground-floor space on Gumpendorfer Straße and has been serving as both bookshop and café since 2002 — one of the earliest and still most considered iterations of the Vienna bookshop-bar. The shelves run floor to ceiling and lean toward literature, philosophy, art, and architecture; the café tables are close enough together that the room has an accidental collective quality in the evenings. The neighbourhood — Mariahilf, between the Naschmarkt and the Westbahnhof — is the correct setting: not a tourist destination, but a place where the people who live nearby come to read.
Mariahilf, Vienna, Austria