The oldest pub in Norway

Three Oslo rooms and a brewery cellar in the Arctic

Engebret Café faces Bankplassen from a house of about 1760, with the old Christiania Theatre’s site across the square; the actors made it theirs, a network of women journalists took its name, and a fire gutted it in 1921 and left it rebuilt as it had been. Dovrehallen is five minutes away on Storgata, in a commercial block of 1898, and it is named after the troll king’s hall in Peer Gynt. A variety stage ran in its cellar until about 1950, the Norwegian Student Society had the rooms from 1952 to 1971, a discotheque and then a dance restaurant with three bars followed, and what trades there now is a brown restaurant above a beer bar. Ølhallen is well inside the Arctic Circle, in the cellar of the Mack brewery on Tromsø’s Storgata, and for its first four decades it was a fishermen’s and trappers’ room open from ten in the morning until six at night, with no women admitted until late in the 1960s. Lorry stands behind the royal palace at the corner of Parkveien and Hegdehaugsveien, in a block of 1874 whose ground floor was a grocer’s and wine merchant’s shop until Ringnes brewery bought the property in 1901 and opened West Café og Restaurant in it. It took the name Lorry in 1940 and was restored in 1998 after a fire. Two hundred and seven pictures by more than seventy artists hang on its walls, many left by painters who worked in the booths and paid in them; twelve beers are poured from the ground-floor bar, and the doors stay open until half past three in the morning.

Where the Norwegian dates come from

The four rest on different kinds of publisher, and the difference is worth naming because it is what the grades on this site measure. Engebret has Store norske leksikon, the national encyclopaedia, which names the founder, separates the 1857 founding from the 1863 move and dates the building to about 1760 — an account careful enough to contradict itself if it were wrong. The Tromsø beer hall has the brewery that owns it and a regional visitor company repeating the year, which is two publishers but only one interest. Dovrehallen has two accounts that disagree by a year and agree about nothing else, and the city encyclopaedia’s version is the more useful because it says which floor the restaurant is on and when it was fitted out. That last detail is what takes the house out of the ranking: the rooms a drinker uses today date from the early 1950s, whatever the cellar below them did in 1900. The reasoning behind that distinction is set out in the methodology.

Lorry is a fourth kind of case, and the most ordinary one: the same city encyclopaedia set against a visitor board. Oslo byleksikon has a grocer’s and wine merchant’s shop on that ground floor until Ringnes took the building in 1901, and the restaurant era beginning then. Visit Oslo, repeated across the Visit Norway sites, says instead that the house has served artists and writers since 1887. Nothing traced supports 1887, and a shop selling wine to carry home is not a drinking house — so the first record of drink served on these premises reads 1901, and the 1870s the house claims belongs to its walls.

The inns this page has not reached

Norway’s genuinely old drinking houses are on the roads rather than in the cities, and none of them is here yet. The gjestgiveri at Granavollen on Hadeland is the clearest case: the first innkeeper known there, Gregers Jensen, put up a separate building for travellers in 1657, it still stands among the seven that make up the house, and his grandson held the royal patent as innkeeper after raising a levy of farmers against Swedish dragoons in 1716. The family kept it until 2010. What stops it appearing is not the date but the counter — everything the house publishes is a conference package, a fixed dinner or a village café selling coffee and waffles, and nothing says a passer-by may have a drink. The same question holds up a Majorstuen brown café whose opening was advertised in an Oslo newspaper on 2 July 1928, a record better than anything else on this page, and which OpenStreetMap no longer maps at all.

How Norway compares

Four houses claiming 1857, the 1870s, 1900 and 1928 put Norway near the young end of this site, and that is a fact about our research rather than about the country. Bergen, Trondheim and Stavanger are unworked here; so is every house that closed. The nearest comparison is the country next door, where the surviving rooms are also twentieth-century and for a related reason — Norway took up the Swedish system of non-profit licensing companies as well, and the same mixture of temperance and municipal control shaped what survived. See the oldest pubs in Sweden for how that worked, and the top 100 oldest pubs for where these four sit in the wider ranking.