The claim
A house at the south foot of the Lindenhof where a landlord sold wine in 1409, and where the Saxon pilgrim Hans von Waltheym stayed at Whitsun 1474 and left one of the earliest printed descriptions of a Swiss inn. A son of one of Zurich's richest textile families turned it into a private dwelling in 1618. The tavern licence was taken up again in 1876, and the house has been a hotel with a restaurant since 1965.
What the records show
German Wikipedia's account of the house, which follows the Zurich art monuments volumes and a 2019 book written about it, records a drinking room here from 1357 on the authority of the nineteenth-century Zurich pastor Salomon Vögelin, and a firmer date in 1409, when the landlord Heinrich Hagnauer sold wine in the house called ze dem Kind. The house itself claims 1474, the Whitsun week when the Halle pilgrim Hans von Waltheym lodged here and wrote up the inn and its host Albrecht Moser in what is counted among the earliest printed descriptions of a Swiss inn. The drinking did not go on unbroken, and a second publisher now shows the gap rather than asserting it. Paul Leemann-van Elck's study of printing and the book trade in the canton of Zurich, published in the transactions of the Antiquarian Society of Zurich for 1950–55 and read through the ETH library's journal archive, follows the house at Pfalzgasse 1 through the years the tavern right was lying idle: the Lindinner printing works passed to a Zurich firm in the Kindli in 1725, a bookseller moved his shop into the house in 1774, Lahr's bookshop left it in 1798 and another was carried in in 1805 and out again in 1809. Leemann-van Elck names a dozen Zurich taverns in the same pages — the Goldener Leu, the Goldenes Schwert, the Storchen, the Rothaus — and never the Kindli, which he calls a house and not a tavern; a search of the archive's eleven million pages returns nothing at all for Wirtshaus zum Kindli or Gasthaus zum Kindli. In 1618 the house had passed to David Werdmüller, of one of Zurich's richest textile families, who made it a private dwelling, and the tavern right was only taken up again in 1876 by Emilie Tribelhorn. A second house of the same name is the trap here: the Haus zum Kindli at Rüdenplatz 8 is a different building with its own history, and the Swiss art-history literature about the Murer figure belongs to that one. Whether a drink alone is served is answered by the published hours rather than in words — the restaurant is open until half past eleven at night while the warm kitchen stops at nine.
| Year | What | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1474 | Claimed founding | The pub |
| 1409 | First record of a drinking house here | E-Periodica, ETH Library |
What to look for inside
- Wine sold in the house by the landlord Heinrich Hagnauer in 1409
- Described by the pilgrim Hans von Waltheym in 1474
- Its painted inn sign of 1557 is in the Swiss National Museum
- A private dwelling from 1618; licensed again in 1876
Visiting
Kindli is in Zürich, Switzerland, at Pfalzgasse 1 / Strehlgasse 24, 8001 Zürich. We do not list opening times, because they change; the pub’s own site is the place to check before you set out.
Sources
- www.kindli.ch/
- de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kindli
- kindli.ch/restaurant
- www.e-periodica.ch/digbib/view?pid=mag-001:1950:36::100
Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026
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