This city is built on a rock with a gorge cut round three sides of it, and everything is either on top or at the bottom. The banks and the European courts are on top. The drinking is down in the Alzette valley, in a brewery quarter and a hamlet in a ravine, and you get back up in a lift bored through the cliff. Five stops, and the vertical is the point.
- 1 · The Cold Open
Konrad
Start on the plateau while you can still see where you are. This is the Ville-Haute, the old fortress town on the rock, and all of it fits inside about a kilometre: the palace, the courts, the banks, and streets that empty at seven when the commuters drive back to Belgium, France and Germany. Konrad opened on the rue du Nord in October 2009 and is the room the people who stayed use: art on the walls, a crowd that argues, and a cellar underneath where bands play. Have one upstairs, then look at the map and understand that everything else tonight is downhill.
open since October 2009, with a cellar that plays · day till late · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
De Gudde Wëllen
The Good Will, on the rue du Saint-Esprit right at the cliff edge, in a tall old house with the Pétrusse gorge dropping away behind it. It opened in December 2014 and it does the lot: concerts, screenings, talks, and at weekends the first floor becomes a dance floor while the cellar runs acid and dub techno until it is very late indeed. It was voted the best bar in the country two years running in 2015 and 2016 and has spent the decade since being the counterargument to every banking hour this city keeps.
opened December 2014, on the cliff edge · evening into the night · verified Aug 2026
concerts through the week, and the first floor becomes a dancefloor at weekends
- 3 · The Anchor
Mousel's Cantine
Down to Clausen, where Benedictine monks were growing hops in the fourteenth century and somebody has been brewing on this stretch of the Alzette ever since. Mousel dates to 1511, Michel Mousel bought the Clausen brewery in 1825, and the beer was made here until 2000 when production went to Diekirch. Then in 2007 a small brewery moved into the old buildings and started making Clausel, the name a contraction of the two, and it is now the only beer brewed in the capital. Eat the judd mat gaardebounen, smoked pork collar with broad beans, which is the national dish and is enormous.
brewing here since the 1300s · lunch and dinner · verified Aug 2026
- 4 · The Wildcard
Bouneweger Stuff
South across the valley to Bonnevoie, the railway district behind the station, which is where people actually live and is markedly less interested in what the courts on the plateau are deciding. This is the corner café on the rue du Cimetière where the quarter has always come to trade news, and it has kept the things a corner café is supposed to have and almost none of them still do: newspapers on a rack, board games, photographs on the walls by whoever asked, and the original wooden skittle alley still in the back. The building is old and the square is one of the oldest in the city. The beer is brewed locally and the kitchen buys inside the country. Order whatever is from here, and roll a few. Closed Tuesdays.
the corner café, and the wooden skittle alley survives · evening, closed Tue · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Café des Artistes
Finish at the bottom, in the Grund, the hamlet in the ravine underneath the whole apparatus. This is a small parlour on the Montée du Grund papered floor to ceiling in old posters, with a piano that gets played most nights by whoever feels like it and occasionally by somebody who can. Gromperekichelcher, the potato fritters, if they are doing them. Then find the lift bored straight up through the rock, ride it back to the plateau, and go to bed knowing the city has two floors and you spent the evening on the right one.
the piano parlour in the ravine · evening till late · verified Aug 2026 · 🏨 the night ends at Hôtel Le Place d'Armes
🎁 What we left off, and why. Scott's Pub and Liquid are both in the Grund within about a hundred metres of Café des Artistes, and Scott's riverside terrace where the Alzette bends is genuinely one of the pleasantest places to sit in the country on a warm evening. Three doors in one hamlet is not a road, so take them as the same stop rather than three: the Grund is small enough that you can be in all of them inside ten minutes, and on a Friday most of the valley is.