Ignaz Diener

The Austrian who was Caterer to Kings

Abstract

Ignaz Diener was Vienna’s foremost restaurateur in the mid-1930s. Son of a Jewish tavern keeper, he spent the ten years before the outbreak of the First World War working in top hotels in Paris, London, Geneva and Berlin, acquiring both the culinary knowledge and linguistic skills required to move easily amongst an international clientele, adding Russian to his repertoire while a prisoner of war in Siberia. After the war, he worked for more than a decade for the world-famous Hotel Sacher, latterly as bar manager, before jumping ship to a newly opened restaurant, Zu den drei Husaren (The Three Hussars). His name and reputation were used to promote the Three Hussars ruthlessly as the place to go for smart Viennese society, leading to a lawsuit by Hotel Sacher, claiming unfair competition, which they lost. Diener’s success ended abruptly with the Anschluss in 1938, when The Three Hussars was sold to Otto Horcher, Göring’s favourite restaurateur, and he himself was imprisoned in the Gestapo HQ. Rescue came from the Duke of Windsor’s equerry who had sponsored him to go to England with his family – The Three Hussars was Edward Windsor’s favourite place to eat in Vienna. A year after arriving in London, Diener was interned on the Isle of Man, where he helped to run the canteens. On release, he wrote a highly successful recipe book called Kitchen Parade, explaining how the average family could make best use of rationed food. A friend from Vienna, Alexander Korda, then recruited him to run the canteens at Shepperton Studios, including, appropriately, for the filming of The Third Man. The final chapter of Diener’s career was as proprietor of a restaurant called The Green Monkey on the outskirts of Reading. He died in 1968.