Chronicle No. 66 · Places

The Cake That Went to Court: Sacher, Demel and the Original Sacher-Torte

Vienna's most famous chocolate cake spent a quarter of a century in litigation over a single word: original.

Tradition holds that Franz Sacher, then a young confectioner, produced a chocolate cake in 1832 for a reception given by the Austrian State Chancellor Klemens von Metternich. The recipe outlived him.

His son Eduard Sacher opened the Hotel Sacher in 1876, on the site of the demolished Theater am Kärntnertor, steps from the Vienna opera house. Eduard died in 1892 and the hotel passed to his wife, Anna Sacher.

Anna is the reason people still tell stories about the place:

• She ran the house for nearly four decades, and was rarely seen without her French bulldogs and a cigar.
• She turned away guests she judged insufficiently aristocratic — while extending generous credit to aristocrats who could not pay.
• The second policy eventually broke the finances. The Gürtler family took over in 1934.

Then came the cake war. The Viennese patisserie Demel also sold a Sachertorte and claimed a lineage of its own. From 1938 to 1963, on and off, Sacher and Demel fought through the Austrian courts over one word.

The 1963 settlement was almost Solomonic. Hotel Sacher kept the right to sell the Original Sacher-Torte. Demel won the right to seal its own cakes as the Eduard-Sacher-Torte.

Twenty-five years of litigation over a chocolate cake sounds absurd until you see what it bought. The Sacher name now travels the world in a small wooden box, and the hotel sells it by the thousand.

Anyone can bake a good torte. Only one house can call it the original — and only because somebody was prepared to spend a generation proving it.

Lesson: Your recipe can be copied; the name guests ask for by heart cannot — defend the asset that is actually defensible.