Café Toscana: A Delightful Experience with Art and Cake

Classical art now hangs on the walls, and the tables are increasingly featuring classic modernism, especially at the start and end of the day (the café’s culinary focus remains the same: cakes and other pastry delights). We’ve already reported on the evening tapas; now, creative twists are bringing new energy to breakfast at Café Toscana at the Blue Wonder. The combination of (pardon the cheap alliteration) art and cake isn’t forced, but it fits the location quite well: the first building behind the Blue Wonder (heading toward the city center) can look back on over 125 years of café tradition, and it was already a hub of art and music back then…

The art on the long wall of the winter garden brings to light a Dresden specialty that usually slumbers in the catacombs of the former Royal School of Applied Arts on Güntzstrasse: that’s where the archive for works by students of theatrical sculpture at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts is located. A program that is unique in this form among Europe’s art academies. The department is headed by Prof. Ulrich Eißner—who also studied right here a few decades ago. And so it came to pass that Clemens Eisold, host of Café Toscana, after making initial contact with the professor (Dresden is, after all, a small town: someone always knows someone else and can make the right connections), found—while searching for five motifs for the café in the theater sculpture students’ archive—a piece among the student works that was created by the owner himself: In 1988, as a student, he modeled the “Madonna and Child” based on a marble relief by Antonio Rossellino from around 1465/70, creating a papier-mâché and plaster cast from the original clay model. His reference: a photograph. Ulrich Eißner, who took over the professorship at the Chair of Theater Sculpture at the HfBK Dresden in 2005, didn’t see the original at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna until much later, during his first trip to Vienna.

A well-known detail of the Sistine Madonna... (Image: Ulrich van Stipriaan)

During my conversation with Prof. Eißner, I had an advantage: I was able to gather information about the masters of “pretending” (after all, massive theater sets are ultimately supposed to be as light as possible…) while simultaneously pretending that the variety of the breakfast presented by the head of the house could be handled with the ease of “just one more little bite.” Note: You can certainly photograph everything and get hungrier and hungrier in the process, but in the end, you just can’t manage to eat it all! So we just chatted briefly about general breakfast trends. You can effortlessly combine different traditions and certainly mix things up a bit now and then—like serving the classic French bistro dish, the Croque Madame, on a sliced croissant instead of toasted bread.