Before New York had the spiffy Neue Galerie to wave flags for the modern art of German-speaking lands, there was the Galerie St. Etienne.

The gallery was founded by Otto Kallir-Nirenstein in 1939, a year after he fled Vienna, Austria, where, in 1923, he had opened his first gallery, named, as it happens, the Neue Galerie. It is now run by Otto’s granddaughter, scholar-dealer Jane Kallir, author of the Egon Schiele catalogue raisonné and other important works.

Apart from the obvious differences, what distinguishes St. Etienne, a commercial enterprise in modest Midtown quarters, from the Museum Mile institution is that the Neue Galerie boasts New York’s swankest coffeehouse. Pastries there are as rich — if not as pricy — as the Gustav Klimts upstairs. As if to make up this deficiency, Ms. Kallir’s latest erudite, perceptive show, “More Than Coffee Was Served,” explores the café and cabaret as both muse and motif of Mitteleuropa’s intelligentsia.

The theme is interpreted broadly, to include not just café and nightclub scenes, but a streamlined chair designed by Adolf Loos, the theorist who declared ornament a crime; exquisite picture postcards published by the Wiener Werkstatte (and lent by Leonard Lauder, brother of the Neue Galerie benefactor Ronald Lauder); and portraits of café personalities such as Loos and Karl Kraus. Sometimes, however, the café connection is a stretch: Charming Klimt studies of society ladies don’t especially arouse an aroma of kaffe mit schlag, and Schiele’s dining scenes could equally be domestic or public.

The show boasts an incredible juxtaposition of portraits in oil by Oskar Kokoschka of the seminal composers of the Second Viennese School, Arnold Schoenberg and his pupil, Anton Webern. The difference of treatment in the two works — a fierce, gushing painterly attack in the 1924 depiction of Schoenberg and a pent-up, formal expressivity for Webern 10 years earlier — isn’t just a matter of artistic evolution: The brush listened to each man’s music.

There are many drawings on show that must have been dashed off in situ, often with a frenetic bravura that tells of the sensuous bean or sharper stimulants. A 1911 drawing by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner catches spectators at a cabaret with exhilarating economy:

The velvety looseness of line of the foreground women in their big hats and billowing skirts contrasts with the heavily scratched cluster of men in the distance. With just a few deft marks, he suggests a galvanized audience.

Similarly, a deceptively slight watercolor and ink study by Emil Nolde from around the same time depicting a couple in a café is filled with social and psychological astuteness. The man, peering in from behind, seems anxious to gain the attention of the woman, who gazes off nonchalantly into the darkness that dominates the composition in the form of a large watercolor stain.

Observed detail, such as these sketches by Kirchner and Nolde, are one response to the coffeehouse. Full-blown allegory, a sense of the hostelry as microcosm of society at large, is another. This comes across in younger artists like the second-generation expressionist Max Beckmann, and the neuesachlichkeit (new objectivity) master, George Grosz, each of whose work fuses the traditions of lowlife genre scene and religious altarpiece.

Beckmann is represented by the fiercely antimilitaristic “The Patriotic Song,” a preparatory drawing for one of the lithographs in his 1919 portfolio, “Hell.” As the convivial company sings away, you can sense the phony euphoria and jingoistic oom-pah-pah of their anthem. Beckmann invests the scene with his characteristic claustrophobia, radically compressing space so that the figures at the top are about to tip out of the picture plane. The already weary faces of the servicemen seem to presage the war wounds and ravaged terrain that await them.

There is an extended group of Grosz images, several from around the time of the Great War. In “Café Megalomania” (1915), a coarse, bloated woman presides over a scene of pandemonium, with waiters rushing around and guests grinning inchoately. The nervous, violent line keeps pace with the scene. The café here becomes a metaphor of a corrupt society, caught at its worst in a locus of posture and indulgence.

In “People at Table” (1920), which depicts tycoons at play, Grosz’s pen lives up to its reputation for merciless satire. Contrasting with the goonish cigar chompers is a sole female, who looks to the viewer with martyred resignation. An altogether more lyrical, louche, almost tender drawing from 1926, “Queen Bar,” suggests the artist making his peace with pleasure seekers. It almost has the insouciance of a Cocteau drawing — except the deliberately jarring detail of the exposed garter of the central female figure gives the work its German accent.

Grosz is not alone in realizing that the café, cabaret, and beer hall share an essential quality with the zoo: At its most sociable, the human animal gives way to primitive urges. No one catches this more luridly than Karl Hubbuch with his undated, interracial “Dance Café”; as grinning black men meld with startled, skimpily clad white partners, grotesque onlookers leer from a gallery that tightly hems in the dance floor below. Tamer watercolors by Jeanne Mammen depict the clamorous café as a hotspot for lesbian interaction.

Even without sex, though, the café heaves. Ludwig Meidner, better known for tight, dark woodcuts of urban life, has a light-filled drawing from 1915 where merriment is caught in a whirling gestalt, the energy of the café literalized into flying walls and sucked through the ceiling. The drawing hits its mark like a shot of espresso.

Until November 25 (24 W. 57th St., between Fifth and Sixth avenues, 212-245-6734).