The claim
A fixture of the Spui since, it says, 1670, Hoppe is one of Amsterdam's best-known brown cafés, with a narrow standing bar in the old house at number 18 and a later seated room next door. Writers, students and office workers have all claimed it over the years, and on summer evenings the crowd spills out onto the square.
What the records show
Hoppe states it has been on the Spui since 1670, originally as a distiller's tasting room, but no primary record for that date was found in the sources checked. The standing bar at no. 18 is the old part; the seated room next door came into the café in the early twentieth century, and that is a fact about the business rather than about the building, which this page had confused. The Dutch national monuments register, read on 17 September 2026 through the Cultural Heritage Agency's linked-data endpoint, lists both houses. Spui 18 is Rijksmonument 5556, a corner house of the seventeenth century whose front was given a straight cornice in the earlier nineteenth. Spui 20 is Rijksmonument 5557, a house with a bell gable of the third quarter of the eighteenth century. So the room Hoppe took over was already about a hundred and fifty years old when it took it, and the seventeenth-century date the café gives for its own corner is at least consistent with the register's date for the building it stands in — which is as far as the register can take a claim about when drink was first poured there.
What to look for inside
- Claims 1670 foundation on the Spui
- Standing bar in the old part at no. 18
- Named best café in the Netherlands by Misset Horeca, 2013
Visiting
Café Hoppe is in Amsterdam, Netherlands, at Spui 18-20, 1012 XA Amsterdam. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.
Sources
- cafehoppe.com/en/about/
- cafehoppe.com/en
- www.entreemagazine.nl/ondernemen/hope-cafe-hoppe-amsterdam
- api.linkeddata.cultureelerfgoed.nl/datasets/rce/cho/services/cho/sparql
Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026
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