Süsswasser

Review

The good alley

Photo: Katharina Gossow Theobaldgasse used to be home to the raunchy, sweaty basement disco Titanic. Its demise was inevitable when the disco was replaced by a very attractive restaurant called Mango on the ground floor in 1999, but that was the beginning of the alley's turn towards delicacy. Then came the Akrap coffee bar, then the wonderful combination of organic food store and electro-on-vinyl specialists called Tongues and then a store concept called Feinkoch, where people who can't shop well can get precisely weighed ingredients for special recipes.
Quite a lot for an alleyway in Mariahilf, you might think, but nothing compared to what has been going on there over the past two months. On the one hand, that's when Süsswasser opened: Benjamin Fehringer, a trained car mechanic specializing in Mercedes-Benz, spent a year turning a former warehouse without water or electricity into a charming fish restaurant that is also a delicatessen, whose goods Fehringer sought out, found and deemed suitable piece by piece.
Great pasta, great oils, good mustard from Lustenau, sausage from Tschürz in Burgenland, prosciutto from d'Osvaldo in Cormons, coffee from Gorizia, bread from the Waldviertel, pickled lemons from Morocco, superb tinned fish from Portugal and Italy ... And, above all, Attersee fish from Ulli Huber, brown trout from the Yspertal and then Martin Müller's fish from the Weißensee, in total pretty much the best fish you can get in Austria.
On Tuesday afternoons, when the fresh delivery arrives, you can have a fish of your choice roasted for the store price and get a glass of wine with it, but the offer on the other days is not bad either. There's a wonderfully fresh cucumber, dill and herring salad, for example, which is incredibly good (€ 6.50); or three kinds of sliced "refined" fish, cold-smoked salmon trout, pickled and smoked char, you simply don't get that much good fish for that kind of money anywhere else in Vienna (€ 7.50). And when the dish of the day is fish lasagne, you don't have to complain either (€ 8.50). But that's not all, because last week Marco Simonis opened his "Urban Appetite" store right next door in the former delicatessen, a branch of his endlessly well-stocked delicatessen in the Dominikanerbastei. Simonis mainly sells specialties from selected small businesses (Aubrac steaks from the Waldviertel!), Viennese organic vegetables, wines from autochthonous grape varieties and homemade delicacies, such as wonderfully old-fashioned patés and, last but not least, the best (and most expensive) sandwiches in the city. With the effect that the small Theobaldgasse can now suddenly do more than the entire Meinl am Graben. A small fish restaurant that is also a delicatessen and a second delicatessen, shoulder to shoulder. Süsswasser 6th, Theobaldg. 16 Marco Simonis Urban Appetite 6th, Theobaldg. 14

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