4 pubs checked · updated 25 October 2026
The short answer
Oldest proof
On record from 1900; the building is dated to about 1850.
Grade A · DocumentedBy claim the earliest Swedish year on this list is 1664, at Pelikan in Stockholm — and the house says itself that the year belongs to a wine cellar on Österlånggatan in the old town, three addresses and two and a half centuries from the room a drinker sits in now. By record the earliest drinking on premises still standing is 31 August 1900, when a beer hall opened on Kungstorget in Gothenburg. Two of the three Stockholm houses were raised by the same architect for the same licensing company, in 1904 and 1908. The third is a German beer hall that returned to its corner of the quay about 1910, the house it opened in having been demolished, and a founding of 1421 circulates about it that nothing supports.
Sweden's old drinking rooms were built by temperance, which sounds like a joke and is the plain history. From 1865 the towns handed the spirit trade to non-profit companies that took no profit from what they sold, and the Stockholm one, licensed in 1876, put up about thirty houses of its own: good food, strictly regulated brännvin, early closing and three classes of room. Two of the four houses on this page are its work, raised on Blekingegatan and Tjärhovsgatan to the same architect's drawings within four years of each other. A third survives from the system's other half. The drink ordinance of 1917, the rationing scheme Swedes call the Bratt system, confined anything above 3.6 per cent to the state shops and left the ölhall — the beer hall — selling weak pilsner and nothing else; of some three hundred beer and wine rooms trading in the first decades of the century, a dozen were left by the 1970s. The fourth house here stands outside both schemes: a German beer hall on the Skeppsbron quay, with Art Nouveau rooms of 1910 and a circulating founding of 1421 that nobody publishes as fact. What the temperance system costs a researcher is the ordinary kind of old pub. What it gives is unusually good paper: a licence moved from one house to another, an architect's name, a company's minutes. The years on this page are early twentieth-century years, and they are better evidenced than most of the medieval ones on this site.
Ölhallen 7:an is one room at the corner of Kungstorget, with bentwood chairs, marble tables and a red and white tiled floor, and it opened on the last day of August 1900 under a waiter named August Andersson. His widow Alida ran it from his death in 1913 until she retired in 1941, their son and then their grandson after her, and it left the family only in 1981. Fourteen beer halls and wine rooms stood around that square when it opened; it is the last of them. Kvarnen is the opposite kind of room — a hall on Södermalm with arched windows and a ceiling two storeys up, opened in 1908 as Grå Kvarn on a serving right carried over from a cellar on Götgatan that closed the same year. Pelikan, ten minutes further south, is its near twin: built in 1904 by the same company and the same architect, trading for sixty-five years as Port Arthur, and given the older name of a demolished house in 1969.
Zum Franziskaner belongs to neither story. It is a German beer hall on Skeppsbron, the quay along the eastern edge of the old town. Visit Stockholm and an interview with its owner both have it opening in 1889, in a building put up about 1620 when Skeppsbron first served as the city’s quay; that building was demolished, and the restaurant moved back to the site about 1910. The Art Nouveau panelling and stucco of that year survive in the old beer hall, which is the dining room now. The house takes no bookings whatever, works first come first served, and keeps two bars — the back-pocket bar and the Lilla Zum — where it says you may slip in for a beer or a glass of wine and will not be served the full menu. Franconian casks are tapped there and left to run without added gas.
Stockholms utskänkningsaktiebolag is the reason this page looks the way it does. Licensed in 1876 to sell spirits in the city, it was a public-benefit company rooted in the temperance movement, which is a stranger thing than it sounds: it existed to take the profit out of drink, fed its customers deliberately well, regulated what it poured, and shut early to improve them. It ran about thirty houses, numbered at first and later named — Grå Kvarn, Shanghai, Port Arthur, Mäster Anders — and at the turn of the century it began building its own. Sam Kjellberg drew five of them, including Blekingegatan 40 and Tjärhovsgatan 4, which are half of this page. That is why both rows can name a year with confidence and neither needs a legend: the year a company raises a building for one purpose is the kind of fact that leaves records, which is more than can be said for most of the claims in the top 100 oldest pubs.
Nothing on this page is medieval, and the one medieval claim attached to it shows why. Several Stockholm guides have Zum Franziskaner founded by Franciscan friars in 1421, licensed by Erik of Pomerania to charge for food and drink, which would put it among the oldest drinking houses on earth; the survey that looked hardest at it says the fifteenth-century origin has no historical backing, and the house itself claims nothing beyond being one of the city’s oldest restaurants. A house whose year comes from a transferred licence, an architect’s commission or a printed local history can be checked; a house whose year comes from a story about friars usually cannot, which is the argument set out in how historians date an old pub. Sweden’s own drinking law then did the sorting: the 1917 ordinance took the strong drink out of the beer halls, and the ones that survived did so as licensed businesses with paperwork rather than as inns with stories. The Gothenburg room survives on an exemption granted by a named official. Kvarnen survives because a company bought one house’s right to pour and moved it four streets. Both are grade A here, and neither claims anything older than its own building.
Four houses is a start, not a survey. Stockholm alone has an older candidate in Den Gyldene Freden on Österlånggatan, which has traded under that name at that address since 1722 apart from a gap in the 1890s. It is held back on one question and that question is not its date: nothing the Freden publishes says a drink is served without a meal, and it advertises a dining room, a private room and a function floor. The same question held back Zum Franziskaner until October 2026, when the house’s refusal to take any booking at all, and the two stand-up bars it keeps for people who want a glass and not a table, answered it. Beyond the two cities, the gästgivaregårdar of the old post roads are entirely unworked here, and so is every beer hall that closed after 1917, which is most of them. For the nearest comparison, where the drinking rooms are also twentieth-century and the records also come from encyclopaedias rather than archives, see the oldest pubs in Norway. How each year on this page was tested is set out in the methodology.
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Stockholm, Sweden
The 1664 the house prints belongs to another building in another part of Stockholm, and the house says so itself. Its history page has the wine-server Hans Georg Cron opening the cellar Pelikan on Österlånggatan in the old town in 1664, the krog moving to Svartmangatan in 1720 and on to Brunnsbacken by Slussen in 1733, where it traded for nearly two hundred years until the block came down in 1931. These rooms are a
Stockholm, Sweden
A founding in 1421 by Franciscan friars, licensed by Erik of Pomerania to charge for food and drink, is printed by several Stockholm guides and is the reason this house turns up on lists of the oldest restaurants in the world. Nothing supports it. The Hidden North's survey of Stockholm's historic restaurants says flatly that the fifteenth-century origin has no historical backing and gives 1889 as the opening year
Gothenburg, Västra Götaland
The 1900 is not the house's own account but a printed one. Swedish Wikipedia, following a 1994 history of the beer hall by Andersson and Larsson, gives the opening as Monday 31 August 1900, in the new shop block at the corner of the square, and names the founder: August Andersson, who had waited at another Gothenburg inn on Basargatan. His widow Alida ran it from his death in 1913 until she retired in 1941, their
Stockholm, Sweden
The 1908 is the house's own and nothing traced contradicts it: its chronology has building begun on Tjärhovsgatan in 1906 and the centenary kept in October 2008. Swedish Wikipedia supplies what the house leaves out - that it opened as Grå Kvarn, one of some thirty houses belonging to Stockholms utskänkningsaktiebolag, the company licensed from 1876 to sell spirits in the city; that Sam Kjellberg designed it, as he
