What happened
Au Bon Vieux Temps was reached through the Impasse Saint-Nicolas, an alley off the Rue du Marché aux Herbes a few minutes from the Grand-Place, behind a carved stone portal that carried the name and gave away nothing else. The room inside had a stone chimney piece, dark woodwork, a stained-glass panel of St Gudula and St Michael, and British advertising on the walls from the years after the Second World War, when servicemen in Brussels made a small estaminet a home from home. The 1695 it was known by is a tradition rather than a record: BRUZZ, the city's news service, ties that year to the French bombardment that flattened the middle of Brussels, and no publisher states it as the year drink was first sold in the house. What the record does hold is the ending. The Belgian Crossroads Bank for Enterprises carries one business at number 4, a sole trader registered there from 1 December 1970 and liable for VAT from the January following, her trade entered as café-restaurant; it ceased on 29 March 2025. A beer writer found the door shut that March and travellers found it shut again in January 2026, one of them saying a fire had closed it. No Belgian publisher has reported the fire, or the closing, either way.
What is there now
Shut. The Belgian companies register records no business of any kind at Impasse Saint-Nicolas 4 as of 11 September 2026, where neighbouring addresses on the Rue du Marché aux Herbes hold active ones, and nobody publishes what has become of the room behind the portal.
Location recorded from OpenStreetMap node 4120134090 (ODbL), the café's own door in the Impasse Saint-Nicolas, last surveyed 8 September 2024.
Sources
- Belgian Crossroads Bank for Enterpriseskbopub.economie.fgov.be
- bruzz.be
- visit.brussels
- Wikipediafr.wikipedia.org
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