3 pubs checked · updated 25 October 2026
The short answer
Oslo's three houses claim 1857, the 1870s and 1900, and not one of those years dates drink served in the rooms a visitor uses now. Engebret Café was opened by Engebret Christophersen in Rådhusgata in 1857 and moved to Bankplassen in 1863, which is where its record at this address begins. Lorry's 1870s belongs to the corner block it occupies; a grocer's and wine merchant's shop held the ground floor until Ringnes brewery bought the property in 1901. Dovrehallen's 1900 belongs to a variety hall in the cellar, and the restaurant trading above it was fitted out in the early 1950s. So the oldest claim and the earliest record are the same house, and the answer is 1863.
The useful question in Oslo is not which house is older but what each of its years is actually dating, because in all three cases the date sits at a distance from the room — and the distances are three different kinds. Engebret's is a move: a business opened in one street in 1857 and settled since 1863 in a house of about 1760 on Bankplassen, which is a six-year gap that only appears when somebody separates a founding from an address. Lorry's is a change of trade: the corner block at Parkveien 12 went up in 1874 with a grocer's and wine merchant's shop on the ground floor, and a shop selling wine to carry home is not a drinking house, so the serving starts when Ringnes took the building in 1901 and opened West Café og Restaurant in it; the name Lorry arrived in 1940. Dovrehallen's is a floor: the variety hall that carries the date was in the cellar, and the brown restaurant using the name today was fitted out upstairs half a century later. Correct all three and the order survives — 1863, 1901, the early 1950s — but every year in it moves, and the city's drinking record begins a long way short of where its signs do.
Engebret Café is a restaurant first and says so: the kitchen closes at half past nine and the house at eleven, and the most recent dated record of it trading that could be traced is an OpenStreetMap survey of September 2023, which is why its status on this site reads believed rather than confirmed. Across the square is the site of the old Christiania Theatre, whose actors made the place theirs. Lorry is the one that will pour a beer and ask no further questions — twelve taps, booths, and published hours that run from eleven in the morning to half past three the next, Tuesday to Saturday. Dovrehallen keeps the beer bar Dovrestua on the ground floor beneath its restaurant, with Norwegian home cooking upstairs, an age limit of twenty and live music for dancing three nights a week. Hours in all three cases are the houses’ own; check them before setting out.
No licensing archive anybody can search has been traced here, so an Oslo year comes from a publisher rather than a document, and the publishers are unusually good. Store norske leksikon, the national encyclopaedia, is careful enough to print Engebret’s founding and its move as two separate facts and to date the building separately again. Oslo Byleksikon, the city’s own, dates a block, names its architect and says which floor a business occupied — and it is that last habit which takes Dovrehallen out of the ranking, on the strength of one sentence putting the restaurant above and the variety hall below. Where the two kinds of source disagree, as they do about Lorry, we follow the one with a trade behind it rather than the one with a round number. The national picture, including the beer hall in the cellar of a brewery inside the Arctic Circle and the post-road inns this site has not reached, is at the oldest pubs in Norway; the closest comparison abroad is the oldest pubs in Sweden, where the surviving rooms are also twentieth-century and for a related reason; and the grading is explained in the methodology.
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Oslo, Norway
Store norske leksikon, the Norwegian national encyclopedia, dates the founding to 1857 and names the restaurateur Engebret Christophersen, puts the house first in Rådhusgata and at Bankplassen from 1863, dates the building to about 1760 with an addition in the 1850s, and records the fire of 1921, the reopening in 1922 in the old shape and a restoration finished in 1986 during the building of the new Norges Bank. It
Oslo, Norway
Lorry's own site says the house has a history reaching right back to the 1870s and that the same family has run it for more than sixty years, through three generations. The 1870s belongs to the building rather than to the serving. Oslo Byleksikon, the city's own encyclopedia, describes Parkveien 12 as a three-storey corner block of 1874 at Hegdehaugsveien, originally with a grocer's and wine merchant's shop on the
Oslo, Norway
Two publishers disagree about the year, and this page prints both. Norwegian Wikipedia has the hall opening on the second day of Christmas in 1900 and calls it a variety stage and a popular licensed drinking place, running as a theatre until about 1950. Oslo byleksikon, the city's own encyclopedia, says the place of entertainment existed from 1901 to 1950, that it opened in the cellar, and that the commercial block
