Preface by Hans jun. and Thomas Figlmüller The book "Viennese Cuisine - Cooking by Pictures" offers a completely new approach to presenting traditional Viennese recipes. Over the years, Figlmüller has become a culinary must for many Vienna inhabitants and visitors alike and has achieved worldwide renown as the "Home of the Schnitzel".We - Hans and Thomas Figlmüller - have been running the family business for almost ten years. In this book we reveal cooking secrets that have been handed down in the Figlmüller family for four generations. We consciously chose to share the recipes in a visual step-by-step format in order to focus on the ingredients that make these dishes so unique and special and to clearly and systematically demonstrate the individual cooking steps from the beginning to the final mouthwatering dish. We feel we owe this not only to our readers but also to the Viennese tradition of gastronomy.The Figlmüller family originally comes from the city of Zwettl in Lower Austria, approximately 100 km north-west of Vienna. Not far away, in the small village of Brauhaus, our great-grandparents ran a brewery and restaurant as well as a sawmill. When our great-grandfather Johann Figlmüller moved to Vienna, he specialized in wine and gastronomy, opening a number of wine taverns. The most well known of them was certainly Weinhaus Figlmüller, which opened in 1905 and has remained largely unchanged to this day. Great-grandfather Figlmüller also introduced a number of specialties from the Waldviertel and Wachau regions, since that was where he had started his career in gastronomy (Krems). Along with these culinary delights, one of the first dishes on the menu was the meanwhile famous Figlmüller Schnitzel. In 1936 the main Figlmüller restaurant located at Wollzeile 5 was expanded to include its own butcher shop, which produced and sold its popular homemade sausage specialties, like bratwurst, liver or blood sausage, as well as something similar to cracklings called Grammeln. After renovation, the menu was also expanded to include more warm dishes.Besides these additions, the third basement level was also converted into a wine cellar, which is still in operation today. The cellar belongs to a network of subterranean spaces that are even connected to the catacombs of St. Stephen's Cathedral, and back then these spaces were also used as air-raid shelters.In the early fifties our grandmother Edith Figlmüller took over the restaurant and wine business, expanding the latter to include two other cellars in Vienna, one in the nineteenth district (Hackhofergasse), the other in the first district (Heiligenkreuzerhof). Our legendary potato salad is still prepared according to our grandmother's original recipe. She was an incredibly dedicated and disciplined woman. She worked at the restaurant day and night until she was 75, then, in 1961 our father, Hans Figlmüller, took over the family business. With the help of our mother, Ursula Figlmüller, he made the now legendary Figlmüller Schnitzel big - not only in size but in scope: it became world famous. Our regular customers included a number of Austrian federal chancellors as well as Romy Schneider and Leonard Bernstein, among others. In the sixties and seventies we even had customers who had their Figlmüller Schnitzels flown to Stockholm or New York by plane. Once during an official visit to Beijing the head of the Austrian delegation asked the Chinese foreign minister what the first thing was that came to mind at the mention of Austria. Surprisingly his answer was not "Mozart", "Kreisky", or "the United Nations Office" but "Figlmüller Schnitzel". Back then this quaint anecdote even made headlines in the Austrian press.In 2002 the family opened the second Figlmüller restaurant in Vienna's first district. Right about the same time, our father stepped down and we took over. Since 1971 there has been a new addition to the family business: a historical Heuriger. This wine tavern on Grinzing