Once Motto.
Now THELL.

Schönbrunner Straße 30, entrance on Rüdigergasse. Franz Thell opened a place here in 1973 and called it Motto. Vienna was a different city then. More conservative, more guarded, with very little room for anyone who did not fit.

Motto made some. Artists, creatives, night owls, queer Vienna — the Beisl turned into a meeting place. The door stayed open at a time when an open door still counted as a statement.

Motto was never only a restaurant. It was a sitting room for the broad-minded, a stage for artists and, for queer Vienna, a place where nobody had to explain themselves. Helmut Berger and Rudolf Nureyev sat at these tables. Helmut Lang carried plates here before he made clothes, and he showed his first collections in the same room. The ORF documentary “Wiener Zeitgeist” names Motto in the same breath as the U4 and the Arena, one of the addresses where the Viennese subculture of the eighties actually lived.

The house backed the Life Ball for twenty years. That openness is not a line in the appendix. It is the load-bearing wall. A room that turns into a stage every night does not flinch when someone unexpected walks in. It never learned how, and has no plans to.

Motto had to close for a time in 1989. Bernd Schlacher took the place on in 1990, made a Viennese institution of it and, from this one address, built what became the Motto Group. Franz Thell stayed. No longer running the place, but still the face the house had worn since the first day. A great host, known for his generosity, and responsible for flower arrangements nobody would have called restrained.

Tom Sampl took over the running of the original house in 2011. From that point Rüdigergasse and the Motto Group went their separate ways, and in 2013 the house became his. Franz Thell kept coming back until the end. He helped with the flowers, taught the new man what a house like this needs and left him his flower knife. Franz Thell died in 2013. Tom Sampl has arranged the flowers at Thell himself ever since. Same knife.

In the summer of 2015 the whole place was rebuilt from the ground up, with Laura Karasinski and Gerd Zehetner. For Karasinski it became one of her first major interior projects. Nine months of research came first: old photographs, guest books, even former staff who still remembered what the house used to look like. Green velvet, marble, brass. What was historic stayed where it was. Everything else was brought up to date. The house does not knock its past down. It polishes it.

The house turned fifty and took a new name on 1 January 2023. No agency pitched it. Thell, after Franz Thell, the founder, the man in the portrait that hangs in the restaurant.

A house with fifty years behind it does not need an invented brand name. It needs one with a face. And it needs to say out loud that it goes its own way from here.

Nothing was sold and nobody took over. Tom Sampl has run the house since 2011 and owned it since 2013. From then on Rüdigergasse went its own way, separate from the Motto Group. The name in 2023 was the last step: the house had been independent for years. Now it says so on the door.

The address is Schönbrunner Straße 30. The door is on Rüdigergasse. Margareten does not do complicated. It does interesting.

The fifth district has never troubled the front pages of a guidebook, which is exactly what makes it good for a long evening. People come for the food, stay for the bar and walk home through streets that gave up hours ago.

The windows give nothing away, and you find the door if you know where it is. That is why guests whose faces you would recognise have been sitting here since the seventies, and why nobody here bothers them — then as now. Eat at Thell and you eat in private. Who, we are not saying.

Thell is a restaurant and a bar under one roof. 170 seats, green velvet, marble and brass, the Restaurant Hinten under a canopy of plants and, in summer, the garden.

The menu is Viennese world cuisine. Viennese classics next to plates with some nerve. Tom Sampl writes it with his long-standing kitchen team. Seasonal, regional, bought from suppliers who have known the house for years. At a party, or right through Advent, dinner has a habit of turning into a whole night. A DJ plays on Friday and Saturday. The Schinkenfleckerl have never come off the menu. Some things you leave alone.

The food here has always been the finest excuse for everything else. Thell is about the evening around it. Eating together, celebrating, flirting, taking your time over all of it. Since 1973.

Photographs, press coverage and further sources on the history of the house.