Au Vieux Spijtigen Duivel, Brussels

The claim

A brasserie and estaminet at the top of the Chaussée d'Alsemberg in Uccle, known to regulars as the Vieux Spijt, with Brussels cooking and a long Belgian beer list. It says Charles V stopped here five hundred years ago, when the house was a posting inn, and calls itself the oldest estaminet in the city. The earliest proof anybody has published of it is eighteenth-century.

What the records show

The claim and the record are a long way apart here, and two publishers with no interest in the house have now said so. Paris Match Belgique wrote in January 2026 that the oldest proof of the house's existence dates from the eighteenth century and that the 1500 is legend. It names no archive for either and no year for the eighteenth-century evidence. The Brussels-Capital Region's inventory of architectural heritage, which is the register the region keeps of its own building stock, dates the house at chaussée d'Alsemberg 621 to 1701–1800, types it as an auberge, classes its style as rural architecture and records it as legally protected since 22 April 2010; its notice, numbered 26736 and written up in 2016, names no builder. So the register agrees with the magazine and both disagree with the sign: the fabric is of the eighteenth century, three hundred years after the year the house counts from, and nothing is entered here as a documented year for drink-led trade. The house's own telling is that Charles V stopped at what was then a posting inn five hundred years ago, that the sign was first A l'Ange and changed after the emperor's visit, and that Victor Hugo lingered here during his Brussels exile while Baudelaire wrote his angry verses about the city; it calls itself the oldest estaminet in Brussels, which is a claim and not a finding, and two other Brussels houses on this site make claims of their own. Drink without a meal is answered by the operator's own hours, which separate the two trades: the brasserie is open from half past eleven until midnight, while food service runs from half past eleven to three and again from six, so the middle of the afternoon is drinking time. Its pages carry separate lists for wines and for Belgian beers, and it describes its own customers as people who came for a good Belgian beer as much as for the history.

What to look for inside

Its own pages say Charles V stopped here when the house was a posting inn
Victor Hugo is said to have spent long hours here during his Brussels exile
Regulars call it the Vieux Spijt

Visiting

Au Vieux Spijtigen Duivel is in Brussels, Belgium, at 621 Chaussée d'Alsemberg, 1180 Uccle, Brussels. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.

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