St. Peter Stiftskulinarium, Salzburg

The claim

A restaurant in the courtyard of the Benedictine abbey of St Peter in Salzburg, in rooms the abbey has served wine and food in for centuries. It dates itself to 803, from a poem by Alcuin of York praising the abbey's cellar and its beer, and calls itself the oldest restaurant in Europe. Its own chronology has townspeople coming in from 1720 and the right to sell beer bought in 1803.

What the records show

The 803 is the oldest date any house on this site claims, and what it rests on is a poem. Alcuin of York, in Charlemagne's circle, wrote a verse — Carmen CXI in the collection Ernst Dümmler edited for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica in 1881 — praising the cellar of St Peter's abbey and the beer in it. German Wikipedia cites that poem, by way of Andreas Otto Weber's study of monastic wine growing, as the earliest mention, and the house cites it as its founding year. A monastery cellar praised in a poem is not a public drinking house, and the abbey's own chronology is the best evidence of when it became one: wine was carried out of Austria under ducal protection in the thirteenth century, Abbot Wolfgang Walcher cut a rock cellar in 1517 and Abbot Chillian Pitricher a second in 1527, and carters and craftsmen were paid in a wine penny or a house draught, so that, in the house's own words, little by little a Buschenschank became a Gaststätte. The year its chronology marks for outside custom is 1720, when it says nobility, townspeople and clergy came in, and the right to sell beer was bought only in 1803, before which the fathers could pour nothing but their own wine. The Austrian press is a good deal later than any of that. The Austrian National Library's newspaper archive, searched on 12 September 2026, gives its earliest mention of the name Stiftskeller St. Peter in the Salzburger Chronik für Stadt und Land of 22 February 1867, where the members of a society who had met from nine until one gathered in the Stiftskeller for a plain meal, and its earliest of the cellar under any name in the Salzburger Zeitung of 9 July 1863, which describes an arrangement made in the St Peter cellar rooms. So the printed record of outsiders eating and drinking there begins in the 1860s, a millennium after the poem and a century and a half after the year the abbey marks. Michael Haydn lived on the floor above from 1763. Abbot Willibald Hauthaler began renovating from about 1900, the baroque hall went up in 1903, the first lease in the house's history was signed in 1992, and the name changed from Stiftskeller to Stiftskulinarium in 2017. Drink without a meal is answered by the operator: its cocktail bar in the abbey courtyard publishes hours from Wednesday to Sunday, three in the afternoon until eleven at night, and offers a casual drink after work or in the middle of a day's shopping.

Dated evidence for St. Peter Stiftskulinarium, earliest first
Year	What	Source
AD 803	Claimed founding	The pub
1720	First record of a drinking house here	ANNO, Austrian National Library

What to look for inside

Its claim rests on a poem by Alcuin of York written about 803
Michael Haydn lived on the floor above the cellar from 1763
A Mozart dinner concert has run in the baroque hall since 1996

Visiting

St. Peter Stiftskulinarium is in Salzburg, Austria, at St.-Peter-Bezirk 1/4, 5020 Salzburg. 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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