Austria's Culinary Capital

Graz is known today as Austria's Culinary Capital. Its vibrant culinary landscape is the result of the efforts of trailblazing women and cooks such as Katharina Prato, as well as a general appreciation of fresh local ingredients. Aside from numerous gourmet restaurants, locals love their many farmers' markets, all stocked to the brim with fresh produce from surrounding farms. Many of Prato’s recipes can still be found on the menus of the city’s various restaurants, proving that Katharina Prato’s influence on popular cuisine was a lasting one.

Austria's 19th Century Martha Stewart
Katharina Prato single-handedly changed how people ate in the Habsburg Monarchy. The author of cookbooks and homemaking guides became a household name as renowned in her day as Martha Stewart is today.

Prato was born in 1818 and taught generations of women in the Habsburg Monarchy how to cook, garden, and go about their housework. She grew up in a well-to-do family in Graz, Austria’s sunny city in the south, bordering Slovenia, Hungary and Italy.

Creative Cuisine. A Lasting Legacy.
She created and recorded lighter recipes than commonly available to most people during this time. Only wealthy aristocrats could afford good cuts of meat. The rest made do with sources of protein we mainly discard today, like cow udder, turtles, or boar head. Her successful recipes were printed in the famous cookbook “Die Süddeutsche Küche” (The Southern German Cuisine). It was first published in 1858 and eventually sold over one million copies.

Explore her undeniable influence and taste some of the ‘healthy’ dishes she promoted back in the 1800s in Graz. Many of her dishes can still be tasted today, best at traditional restaurants in Graz: For example, sauteed ox cheeks with polenta and venison ragout at the Landhauskeller, or liver-dumpling soup at the Altsteirische Schmankerlstubn.