3 pubs checked · updated 18 September 2026
The short answer
By claim and by record the earliest date in Vienna on this list belongs to the same house, and it is the rare case where the record runs ahead of the claim: the Griechenbeisl says on its own pages that it has been serving guests for 550 years, which puts its founding around 1476, while German Wikipedia gives the first documentary mention of the beisl as 1447, in a corner house first recorded in 1350. The other two houses date themselves from a spice shop of 1618 and a siege of 1683, and the City of Vienna's own encyclopedia puts both of their counters in the nineteenth century.
Three houses in this city, all of them in the Innere Stadt, and all three came to selling drink from a different trade. The Griechenbeisl is a beisl on the Fleischmarkt, at the foot of the Griechengasse, and it takes its name from the Levantine Greek merchants who settled nearby in the seventeenth century. The Esterházykeller is a Keller, two floors under an aristocratic palace in a lane off the Graben, pouring wine from the family's own estate on the Leithaberg. Zum Schwarzen Kameel began as a spice and grocery business in the Bognergasse and grew a wine room onto the side of it. That is the pattern worth carrying through this page: in Vienna the room you drink in is usually a floor, a trade or two centuries away from the business whose year is over the door. The city also keeps a historical encyclopedia of its own, written from property and licensing records, and it contradicts two of these three houses rather than confirming them. What the contradiction turns on is not a licence but a measure. A cellar that would sell you no less than five Maß was a store you bought wine from; a Seitel is a glass, and pouring by the Seitel is selling a drink. A Viennese cellar can be shown doing the first for twenty years before it does the second, which is the distinction this site's ranking is built on.
Griechenbeisl is the one the guidebooks send people to, and the reasons are genuine: a wall of signatures in the Mark Twain room running from Bismarck to Egon Schiele, and a room named for the balladeer Augustin, who is said to have fallen into a plague pit drunk and climbed out alive. The corner of the Fleischmarkt and the Griechengasse it stands on is first recorded in 1350 and the building is a protected monument, with parts of the cellars held to be older still. Esterházykeller is two floors down off the Haarhof, under brick vaulting the house calls fifteenth-century on one page and sixteenth-century on another, with a water-cooled counter for bottled wine that is unusual at this size; Adolph von Menzel painted the cellar in 1871. Zum Schwarzen Kameel is the busiest and the youngest in its fabric: the house at Bognergasse 5 was rebuilt in 1901 and fitted out in the Viennese Jugendstil by Portois & Fix, and its ground-floor bar pours wine, cocktails and coffee from eight in the morning until midnight, with no reservations taken. Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller, a customer, drew the camel the firm still uses.
The Esterházykeller is the clearest lesson in Vienna and it is worth following slowly. The house tells the siege of 1683, when the city wall ran close to the Haarhof and Prince Paul Esterházy’s men were given free wine before the fighting; a Vienna daily repeated the year in April 2026 when new tenants took the place on. The City of Vienna’s historical encyclopedia, working from property and licensing records, says instead that the cellar opened in 1808, that at first nothing under five Maß of wine was sold, and that only from 1828 was it also poured by the Seitel. Both accounts can be true of the same room, and only one of them describes a drinking house — five Maß is a quantity you take home, and a Seitel is a glass you drink there. That is why the year recorded here is 1828, why the 1683 is shown as the claim it is, and why the cellar keeps its page and leaves the ranking. Zum Schwarzen Kameel fails the same test at a different date: its 1618 belongs to Johann Baptist Cameel’s spice and grocery shop, and the wine room was extended onto it only after a former bookkeeper took the business over in 1818. If the vocabulary of shop, cellar and tavern is unfamiliar, inn, tavern or alehouse sets out the same three trades in their English forms, and how historians date an old pub gives the order the tests are worth applying in.
Vienna is the one city on this site where the honest answer to “is it open” needs a paragraph. The Kameel’s bar keeps the longest hours of the three and takes no bookings, which is as plain an answer to this site’s first question as a house ever gives. The Griechenbeisl trades as a restaurant serving Viennese cooking and publishes a menu of food alone, so whether a walk-in is poured a glass there is genuinely unknown to us and is printed as unknown. The Esterházykeller is in the middle of a change of hands: the deep cellar is shut until further notice, the Stüberl beside it pours daily with an hour of drinking after the kitchen stops, and the brickwork was to be cleaned through the summer of 2026. Check each house’s own page before setting out.
Three houses is thin for a city of this size, and the gap is ours: all three stand in the first district, the neighbourhood beisln of the districts beyond it are unworked here, and so are the coffee houses, each of which would need the same question asked of it. The national picture, including a Salzburg monastery brewery with the firmest record in the country, is at the oldest pubs in Austria; for how a claim is weighed against a record on this site, read the methodology, and the full international ranking is at the top 100 oldest pubs.
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Vienna, Austria
One of the few houses on this site whose record is older than its claim. The Griechenbeisl says on its own pages that it has been serving guests for 550 years, which puts its founding around 1476; German Wikipedia gives the first documentary mention of the Griechenbeisl as 1447, and the building on the corner as first recorded in 1350. The City of Vienna's own historical encyclopaedia, read on 17 September 2026, is
Vienna, Austria
The house dates itself to 1618 on its own pages, and what 1618 dates is a shop: Johann Baptist Cameel, a merchant who had come to Vienna from Brno, bought a house already standing in the Bognergasse and set up a spice and grocery business, which he named after himself. The City of Vienna's historical encyclopedia puts that a year later, in 1619, and it is worth knowing that the round anniversary the firm kept in
Vienna, Austria
Two Viennese accounts of this cellar disagree, and the city's is the harder one. The house tells the Turkish siege of 1683, when Prince Paul Esterházy's men were given free wine before the fighting; the wall that ran past the Haarhof was not the one the Turks were shooting at, because the city's own archaeological map of the old town puts nothing later than the middle ages at this corner — the Reflertor gate, dated
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