Prague drinks below street level and dates itself from whichever deed came to hand. Four of these five carry a founding year the Czech record will not support in the form it is printed, and the true stories underneath are better. Start at ten in the morning if you want to keep up.
- 1 · The Cold Open
U Fleků
The 1499 is a maltster. Vít Skřemenec bought the house that year and began malting in it, which is a trade in grain and not a brewery or a pub, and the five centuries of unbroken brewing everybody counts starts from that. The name arrived in 1762 with Jakub Flekovský. The dark 13 degree recipe is 1843, and after a hundred and seventy seven years of dark only they added a pale one in 2020, brewed by the great great grandson of the man who bought the place in 1920. The rooms you sit in are the rebuild of 1900. Glasses are 0.4, not a half.
a malt house from 1499, this name since 1762, these rooms 1900 · daily 10am till 11pm, shut 24 Dec · verified Aug 2026
- 2 · The Detour
U Zlatého Tygra
A pub from 1816, then a patriotic café for thirty years where Mácha and Palacký argued, then a pub again from 1864 when Antonín Felber put Pilsner on and nobody has taken it off since. Bohumil Hrabal sat at the back table, in front of the kitchen door. On 11 January 1994 Havel brought Bill Clinton and Madeleine Albright in just before half past eight; Hrabal was by the window in a wheelchair and was waved over. Clinton went on to Reduta afterwards and played Summertime on a saxophone Havel had given him. The measure is 0.45 of a litre.
a pub from 1816, a café, then a pub again from 1864 · daily 3pm till 11pm, full within the quarter hour · verified Aug 2026
- 3 · The Anchor
U Medvídků
The brewery is claimed from 1466 and it stopped in 1898, when the last brewer here left to run the big new works out at Holešovice. Nothing was brewed on these premises for a hundred and six years after that. They started again on 17 November 2004 and it is now the smallest restaurant brewery in the country, three hundred hectolitres a year at the outside. The X-Beer is thirty three degrees of original gravity and twelve and a half percent, two hundred days in oak, and they will tell you it is the strongest in the world. Budvar if you intend to walk out.
brewed 1466 to 1898, and again since 2004 · from 11.30am, till 11pm, later Thu to Sat · verified Aug 2026
- 4 · The Wildcard
U Sudu
A vinárna rather than a pub, and the reason to come is underneath it. The heritage register records that this building stands on the plot of a large Gothic house of which the cellars survive, and they run down several levels with a dance floor and a table football at the bottom. Three hundred people fit inside. Barrel wine is the point, though every bar down there pours beer as well. The business is not as old as the vaulting, whatever anyone implies: its innkeeping licence dates from 1994. It has no website and never has had one.
Gothic cellars, and a wine bar licensed since 1994 · from 9am till 4am, 5am Fri and Sat · verified Aug 2026
- 5 · The Last Call
Black Angel's
Our 1930s was wrong and the bar says so itself: it opened in 2012, and the Prohibition styling is a theme rather than a history. The tale they tell is that a walled-up box turned up during the 2009 cellar works holding the diary and recipes of a First Republic barman named Alois Krcha, who planned a bar down here and, in their own words, never built it. So even the legend concedes there was never a thirties bar in this cellar. What is real is six hundred years of Gothic vaulting and a serious cocktail list. Over eighteens, dressed properly, and leave the camera behind, because they do not allow photographs.
a Gothic cellar, a bar since 2012 · daily 5pm till 3am · verified Aug 2026