Los 36 Billares, Buenos Aires

The claim

A bar and billiard hall on Avenida de Mayo, in the ground floor and basement of a 1914 apartment block. Eight billiard tables more than a century old were restored in 2014 and nine pool tables added in 2018, and there is a school in the back room where porteños learn to play. Coffee, wine and beer at the counter, pizza and empanadas from the kitchen, and the tables in use until the small hours.

What the records show

The 1894 is the house's own, printed at the head of the counter menu it publishes, which calls itself a pizzeria and a bar notable and puts the opening in the year Avenida de Mayo was being cut through the old town. The city's tourism service gives the same year, and the Spanish Wikipedia article credits Horacio Spinetto's Cafes de Buenos Aires, published by the city's heritage directorate in 2008. None of the three points at a licence, a deed or a directory, so the year is a claim with a long pedigree rather than a record, and no earlier mention of drink sold on the corner was traced. The fabric is younger than the claim: the rooms are the ground floor and basement of a block put up in 1914 for the La Franco Argentina insurance company to designs by Tiphaine and Colmegna, a building that now also holds a hotel, so whatever opened in 1894 did not open in this building. What the city does certify is the present. Its register of cultural spaces lists the house as a bar in the notable category at Avenida de Mayo 1265, the protection the city legislature created by its Law 35 of 1998, and drink is served at the counter without a meal: the counter menu runs from coffee through wine by the glass and bottled beer to fernet with coke. A second city register was read on 18 September 2026 and is the first to name the house on its own entry. The planning subsecretariat publishes the whole of the city's Áreas de Protección Histórica as an open table of 48,848 parcels, and parcel 012-049-006 in Monserrat is entered as Bar los 36 billares at Avenida de Mayo 1261/1265/1271 and Avenida Rivadavia 1258/1260/1264, catalogued within area 1, San Telmo – Avenida de Mayo, at the protection level the city calls cautelar. That settles the address, which has been printed three ways — 1271 here, 1265 in the register of cultural spaces, and all of 1261, 1265 and 1271 on the one parcel. It settles no date. The entry gives no year, describes no fabric, and its protection comes from the area designation applied parcel by parcel rather than from any finding about this building: eleven parcels in this block are catalogued the same way, the Hotel Chile at 1295 among them, and so is the Teatro Avenida across the avenue. So the 1894 stands where it stood, and the oldest year any official document here fixes is still the block of 1914. The bar closed in 2013 when a pizza chain bought it and reopened on 24 September 2014 after a restoration that won a city prize the following year for work in the historic quarter.

Dated evidence for Los 36 Billares, earliest first
Year	What	Source
1894	Claimed founding	The pub
c.1914	Present building	https://turismo.buenosaires.gob.ar/es/gastronomico/36-billares

What to look for inside

Named after the maker of its billiard tables
Eight billiard tables over a century old, restored in 2014
Federico Garcia Lorca among the writers who used it

Visiting

Los 36 Billares is in Buenos Aires, Argentina, at Avenida de Mayo 1271, Monserrat, Buenos Aires. 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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