Anthony Bourdain stood at Würstelstand zum Hohen Markt in Vienna and reflected on how his trip had shaped a new imaginary of the city, now feeling a need to return for the cake, culture, and cuisine the Austrian capital serves up.

Our trip wasn’t as profound. We’d just left a spa near Vienna’s central train station after a 16 hour flixbus that arrived at 5am. Mentally, we were haggard but our exceptional cleanliness from the spa gave us the confidence to enter the tourist masses and brave it for a bratwurst.

The stand is unassuming, an hexagonal panopticon affair, the vendor having eyes-on at all times. We stood out like sore thumbs, tourists to the toe in our matching rain coats and inability to pronounce even the simplest of German words, so the vendor was short and to the point. Fine by me.

I ordered a Käsekrainer, a sausage filled with cheese, and opted for both mustard and ketchup. The vendor prepared my cheese sausage with a deft touch (suited more for a Formula 1 pit stop than a sausage stand) – cutting the roll at an acute angle, flipping it onto the sausage with the roll already sauced up. He handed it to me before I could even blink.

Ironically, the sausage wasn’t something I’d usually write home about. It was subtle, with the cheese not really drawing much attention to itself. The bread roll was soft and fresh, and the sauce pooled towards the lower end of the roll like a melted calypso – which wasn’t a bad thing.

For €5.80 in central Vienna you can’t complain, it gave Austrian street food culture in pit stop form, not something to turn your nose up at, but sadly Anthony, not something that would bring me back to Vienna.