The claim
The last of Bern's cellar taverns, reached by a hatch and a flight of steps off the Gerechtigkeitsgasse, where the city once had more than two hundred of them. Its own date is 1635 and the street's architectural history says 1632. Swiss cooking is served under the vault, along with an apéro for anyone not eating, and the cellar keeps going long after the midday kitchen has closed.
What the records show
The house prints 1635 over its own door; German Wikipedia's account of the Gerechtigkeitsgasse, which follows the Bern art monuments volumes and the Swiss art guide, says the cellar tavern at number 62 was founded in 1632 and is the last of the more than two hundred cellar taverns Bern once had. Three years is well inside a generation, so the founding date stands either way, but the two numbers disagree and the reader is owed both. Swiss scholarship, read through the ETH library's journal archive, is franker than either. Paul Schenk's article on old Bernese inns in the Berner Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Heimatkunde for 1945 says the 1635 is a figure chiselled into the door surround, that the house was sold in 1652 by Hans Rudolf Zehnder of Worb to Wolfgang von Müline and stayed in that family until 1940, and that the cellar was probably already pouring the owners' own wine, tithe wine and pension wine before 1635 — probably, on his own word, with no document named. The building report in the Zeitschrift für schweizerische Archäologie und Kunstgeschichte for 1942, printed when a credit of 83,000 francs was voted for the restoration, records the lintel dated 1635 on its inner face and a crossbeam in the courtyard dated 1534, and calls the Klötzlikeller the only cellar tavern left. The Berner Woche, in a two-part illustrated piece on the Klötzlikeller and Bern's cellar taverns in 1934, said the house was built in 1545. So four publishers give four dates — 1534 on a beam, 1545 for the house, 1635 on the lintel, 1632 for the tavern — and none of them cites a lease, a licence or a cellar book. That the house serves a drink alone it says itself, inviting guests for a sociable apéro as well as for dinner, and it publishes a drinks card separately from its menus; the cellar keeps serving until half past eleven at night while the kitchen's midday service ends at half past two.
| Year | What | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 1635 | Claimed founding | The pub |
| 1632 | First record of a drinking house here | E-Periodica, ETH Library |
What to look for inside
- The last surviving cellar tavern of the more than 200 Bern once had
- Founded 1632 by the street's architectural history, 1635 by the house
- The 1635 is a date cut into the door lintel, not a record of a founding
- Under the Gerechtigkeitsgasse in the old town of Bern
Visiting
Klötzlikeller is in Bern, Switzerland, at Gerechtigkeitsgasse 62, 3011 Bern. 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.kloetzlikeller.ch/
- de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerechtigkeitsgasse
- www.e-periodica.ch/digbib/view?pid=zgh-001:1945:7::120
- www.e-periodica.ch/digbib/view?pid=zak-003:1942:4::95
Know something we don’t?Suggest a correctionLast checked Sept 2026
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