I once drank at a pub in Ireland where Vikings had commiserated after invading the Green Isle. It was older than you or I, our great grandparents, or even the Magna Carta. It was from the dark ages for sure, and where once Vikings swilled brews, today, tourists eat fish and chips while locals complain about Eurozone politics. If you look closely enough and kind of squint at the Brazen Head, you can just barely picture middle ages Dublin. You can almost smell the smoke. If those walls could talk, they would tell the tale of mankind's ascent into a sophisticated society, for better and worse. I wondered while I sat at the bar scribbling into my little notebook, how many other really old places are out there?
It is rare for a restaurant or bar to last a very long time - where a long time is determined with a measuring stick notched in decades. The public houses, inns, and restaurants on this list evade conventional measurement, lasting centuries atop centuries. These are places where arguments took place about the events we only read about in history class. The oldest companies in the world are Japanese, but every spot on this list is European. The Germanic people, it seems, are especially adept at building things that last a very long time. They dominate this list.
