When Hildegard Fehr greets her customers at Café Mozart tomorrow, it will mark a milestone in one of the most unusual and heart-warming success stories on the Washington restaurant scene.

Her Viennese-German restaurant will be celebrating its 25th anniversary, an occasion she must often have wondered whether she’d ever see in the earlier years.

Hers is a fascinating story. She opened for business on H Street N.W., between 13th and 14th streets, on June 29, 1981. Instead of the sleek office buildings, Hilton Garden Inn, Starbucks, McPherson Square Metro and bustling shops and restaurants that now surround her, she found herself in the middle of a seedy, sleazy neighborhood more akin to Hamburg’s infamous Reeperbahn than the storied elegance of her native Vienna, Austria.

Fourteenth Street was lined with strip joints, where go-go girls plied their trade in front of randy drunks. The area was populated with rowdy bars like the Brass Rail where police were regularly called to break up alcohol-fueled brawls and the late Rep. Wilbur Mills (D) of Arkansas cavorted with Argentine stripper Fanne Foxe before she ended his career by jumping from his car into the Tidal Basin.

But that was then, and this is now, and the 74-year-old former cook at the Austrian Embassy and her staff will be passing out T-shirts to commemorate the anniversary. They’ll serve up slices of Sachertorte while keeping one eye on the World Cup soccer finals, which they were doing when I had lunch there Tuesday.

Indeed, Frau Fehr and her multinational staff are entitled to bask in the limelight of her steel-willed determination to realize the American dream.

“When we moved in in 1981, we had go-go girls on 14th Street and the Brass Rail on 13th, and police were there around the clock,” she recalled at the end of a grueling day, which began with a rain-delayed one-and-a-half-hour commute from her Silver Spring home. (It took her two and a half hours the day before.)

“We had a lot of burglaries,” she said. “It was very bad. In the first five years, we had 38 burglaries. They were mostly looking for cigarettes. Once they smashed a $7,000 window to get them.”

She and her Swiss-born, 87-year-old husband met in Holland in the mid-1950s. In 1956 she came to Washington as a cook at the Austrian Embassy, and he followed the next year, hiring on as a steward on a steamship line to gain passage. He worked as a butler at the embassy, and they were married in Rockville, Md., that year.

She left the embassy to work as a cook at the old Swiss Chalet restaurant at 6th and L streets, and then in 1964 she and her husband took over the deli at the Manger Hamilton Hotel on 11th Street.

They operated the deli until they opened Café Mozart at the present location, then occupied by the Herald Square Cafeteria. Her husband was the restaurant’s host until about 10 years ago but is now confined to a wheelchair.

Fehr has persisted over the years in providing diners the most authentic Viennese-German cooking, from fluffy buttermilk pancakes, hearty omelets and French toast at breakfast to flavorful wursts and sausage platters and piquant German potato salad at lunch, to classic Hapsburgian dishes like wienerschnitzel, hasenpfeffer, sauerbraten and luscious potato pancakes at dinner, even throwing in beef goulash and cheese fondues for good measure.

For the first 20 years or so Fehr ran the kitchen, but about five years ago she turned it over to Thomas Schwartmann, a chef trained in Germany and Austria who was working for a private club in Bermuda when he answered her Internet ad. Still, it’s pretty much the basic menu she started with 25 years ago, featuring the classic Viennese specialties like sauerbraten, potato pancakes and a dizzying array of sausages and veal, pork and chicken schnitzels. For those on a diet, the venison bratwurst is a good choice; it’s only 6 percent fat.

But neither I nor The Hill’s photo editor, Patrick Ryan, was in a mood to diet when we had lunch there Tuesday. Ryan, a certified Irish-American, and I, a descendant of Irish, Swiss and German forebears, chose two of the House specialties — the sausage sampler for him and venison steak for me. We washed it down with good German beers — actually, he had two.

His five different sausages — bratwurst, weisswurst, smoked bratwurst, Polish kielbasa and knockwurst — were served with German potato salad and vinegary red cabbage and were enough to satisfy a Wagnerian opera singer, while my venison steak, a special of the day, was perched atop spaetzle and accompanied by red cabbage. Both were delicious, although my venison was overcooked.

I started with a cup of the daily-special soup, cream of asparagus, which, according to my notes, was thick, creamy and tasty. But it was a mistake, as it took the edge off my appetite and ought to be ordered only after having climbed the Matterhorn. Our meal was accompanied by a basket of undistinguished breads.

Meanwhile, we were treated to a play-by-play account of the World Cup soccer game between France and Spain on the TV in the adjacent private room, which seats 24, by our Ukrainian waiter, still gloating over his country’s 3-0 penalty-kick shootout over Switzerland in Cologne the day before.

In fact, the staff of Café Mozart is a veritable United Nations delegation; the waiter from Ukraine, waitresses from Mongolia and Ethiopia and manager Farouq Ahmed from Pakistan. Ahmed was the first employee at the present location; he came to work June 30, 1981.

But he’s not the senior employee. That honor goes to Sarah Bundu from Sierra Leone, who has worked for the Fehrs since they ran the deli on 11th Street. Bartender Greg Brooks, who presides over the bar and lounge, where lunch is served, is a relative newcomer; he has only been there for 11 and a half years.

Café Mozart is actually much more than a café. In addition to the 150-seat restaurant, adjoining bar and lounge and private dining room, it also includes a well-stocked German deli and carry-out serving every kind of traditional German, Austrian and Swiss specialties from sausage to chocolates, as well as a konditorei that once housed a printing firm but now offers cakes and pastries designed to wreck any diet.

You have to walk through the deli and konditorei to get to the restaurant and bar, which serves to whet one’s appetite. Most of the above specialties can be ordered on the restaurant’s website.

If you really want to get into the Mozartian mood, you can listen to an accordion player, classical pianist or folk singer most evenings or attend one of the monthly opera nights. The next one is July 19 from 7 to 9 p.m. and features virtuoso clarinetist Henning Hoehne and tenor Michael Blaney. There’s no cover charge if you order dinner, but come early, as they don’t take orders during the performances.

Café Mozart
1331 H St. N.W.
(202) 347-5732
www.cafemozartgermandeli.com

Hours: Mon.-Fri. 7-10 p.m.; Sat. 9-10 p.m.; Sun. 11 a.m.-10 p.m

Price: Moderate. Appetizers, sandwiches, salads $5.95-$12.95; Viennese and German specialty entrees $13.95-$24.95; sausage plates $10.95-$13.95; desserts $2.50-$6.95. About $30 per person at lunch and $60 per person at dinner, with wine and dessert. There’s an extensive German wine list as well.

Ratings: 3 out of 5 domes