Restaurant Bauer

Restaurant Bauer, on Sonnenfelsgasse in Vienna, is remembered as both a setting for Henry Pelham and Celia Favreau’s intimacy and a place shadowed by the impending disaster at the Flughafen. Their conversation there turned toward moving in together; in retrospect, that prospect belongs to the same evening as their last dinner out and the final catastrophe that ended their life together.

Setting and Place in Their Life

Restaurant Bauer belonged to the couple’s shared habit of seeking out new restaurants in Vienna. They were not especially knowledgeable about food, but appreciated good meals and were willing to pay for them. Henry’s recollection places the restaurant among Zum Schwarzen Kameel, Mraz & Sohn, Kim Kocht, and Steirereck, venues that marked a pleasure they could share beyond their work.

The restaurant is also referred to in the recollection as Walter Bauer. Henry says they visited it only once, during the anxious hours before the catastrophe at the Flughafen. Its singular place in their dining history gives it a different weight from the other restaurants he names: it is not simply part of a list of favored outings, but the setting attached to their last evening together.

Courtship and the Proposal

At Restaurant Bauer, Henry made an effort to look smart for dinner. Celia notices his correctly tied black necktie against the disheveled appearance that normally suited his work as a field agent, and his gentlemanly manner strikes her as suspicious. He has already ordered drinks: a martini for himself and a Blauer Portugieser for her. Their familiar ease sits beside the sense that he has come with something to say.

Henry reaches across the table to hold Celia’s hand and tells her he has been thinking. Then he asks whether she wants to move in. Her brief, questioning response gives her time to register the proposal and, as the later recollection recognizes, to retain control of the moment. Henry has already imagined a next stage for them: they could move into either existing apartment, or find something larger in the Innere Stadt, down by the river. He sees a shared home as a way to live more like ordinary people and, in his words, to be human.

The Last Evening and Its Afterlife

For a time, the couple eat in silence, absorbed in the flavors on their plates. Henry later identifies the meal as their last dinner out together. Some hours afterward, before events became worse on the tarmac, they had sex for the final time. He remembers it as neither their best nor their worst; what changes its meaning is the knowledge, acquired afterward, that it marked the end of their time together. He regrets not having given more and committed more of the evening to memory, because memories were all that remained to him.

That same night, Celia asked Gene Wilcox for the phone logs and discovered the call to Amman from her boss’s phone. Henry identifies her decision not to share that information with Victor Wallinger or the others as one of the mysteries he has come to answer. Thus the restaurant’s private history with the couple runs alongside a concealed institutional question: a proposal and a last meal are bound to the discovery that would later matter to the investigation.

Narrative Significance

Restaurant Bauer acts as a hinge between the intimacy Henry remembers and the disaster that gives the memory its finality. The earlier recollection of his proposal is tender but also painfully retrospective: the future he had mapped out was never realized, and ordinary gestures—a hand held across a table, a carefully chosen tie, a shared meal—acquire the weight of a life that ended abruptly. The restaurant is therefore more than a backdrop for romance; it concentrates the contrast between the couple’s imagined next stage and the secrets and catastrophe already gathering around them.