Finland keeps a public alcohol licence register, which means a Helsinki room can be checked against the state rather than its own website. Five of them, from a glass pavilion in the Esplanadi to a Kallio bar with bus benches for seats and no website at all.
- 1 · The Cold Open
Kappeli
A confectioner's kiosk stood here in 1840 and Hampus Dalström's glass pavilion replaced it, begun in 1865 and finished in 1866, with the restaurant opening the year after. It was summer only until 1916. One thing almost nobody knows: between 1993 and 2000 Kappeli held a brewing licence and made beer on these premises. HOK-Elanto bought the building from the city in 2020 for twenty million euros. Take the terrace, which does not take bookings, and either the salmon soup or the smoked salmon they flag as the house classic.
the pavilion 1866, the restaurant 1867 · daily 10am till midnight, from 9am in high summer · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
Salve
A sailors' room by the Hietalahti shipyard, and almost nothing about it is where you would think. Its own written history hedges the 1897 with the word reportedly, and the newspaper archive cannot find a Salve on this quay at all. When the landlord would not renew in 2016 a rival tried to buy the name and the fittings; the operator refused, and on 16 September the regulars carried the interior a hundred and eighty metres across the junction themselves. So the handsome 1927 stone building is not this one. This one went up in 2000 and a draft plan proposes to demolish it. Order the silakat.
the house says 1897 and the archive cannot find it · Mon-Fri from 11am, weekends from noon, till 10.30pm · verified Aug 2026
- 3 · The Anchor
Sea Horse
Not 1934. An advertisement in Uusi Suomi on 21 December 1933 reads: today Restaurant Sea Horse opens, Kapteeninkatu 11. The restaurant's own site has caught up with that; Wikipedia and most of the English press have not. Everybody calls it Sikala, the piggery, and so does the restaurant. Order the sipulipihvi, the onion steak, or fried herring with mash, and the Vorschmack if you want Mannerheim's dish. The house shot is called Number Eight and it costs eight euros. Crayfish season opened on 21 July.
opened December 1933 · daily 3pm till midnight in summer, longer from September · verified Aug 2026
- 4 · The Wildcard
Roskapankki
The name means bad bank, and the story is that this was a branch of a savings bank that went under in the crisis of the early nineties. That story appears in one bar guide and nowhere else: the Finnish encyclopedia entry for roskapankki is about finance and never mentions the pub at all. Call it folklore. What is certain is that it has been licensed here since 2007, it has no website of any kind, the seats are bus benches and you are invited to write on the walls. The cheapest beer in Kallio, and it opens at nine in the morning.
reportedly about 1992, licensed here since 2007 · reported daily 9am till 2am, no operator source exists · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Ateljee Bar, Hotel Torni
The tower is 1931, Finland's first skyscraper, seventy metres and thirteen floors by Valter Jung. The bar is not: Ateljee opened in 1951, twenty years after it. There is a rooftop walkway built in the thirties as a mooring mast for the Graf Zeppelin, which never came. The Soviet Control Commission was quartered in this building from 1944 to 1947. The kitchen is registered as closed every day of the week, so this is a drinks room and nothing else. A cocktail on the thirteenth floor, up a spiral staircase; the twelfth is step free.
the tower 1931, the bar since 1951 · daily from noon, till midnight, 2am Fri and Sat · verified Aug 2026