Norway’s Best Cocktail Bars
A good drink is hard to find — but worth the effort
Finding a decent cocktail in Norway is not easy. But when you discover the right place, the drinks are perhaps all the more memorable for being so elusive. Teresa (my beloved spouse) and I just spent 80 days in Norway; in that time, we could count on the fingers of one hand the number of great cocktail bars we found (with our other hand still clutching a glass).
My worst-case scenario was a cafe-bar in Ålesund. I ordered a gin and tonic, and the young man behind the bar looked at me, eyes wide, terrified. “Is that made with vodka?” he asked. I had to walk him through making the drink, step by step.
Cocktails are not super-popular in Norway. This is partly because alcohol, except for beer, is pretty expensive due to liquor taxes. So it’s no surprise that beer rules in the land of the Vikings. Mixed drinks usually cost “north” of $15. To minimize costs, what most Norwegian young adults do when they want to go out for an evening — so we’ve been told — is have a few drinks at home, meet up with friends in a bar for a single round, and then go to an afterparty at somebody’s house.
The other inhibitor to a cocktail culture is Norway’s strict drinking and driving laws. The legal blood-alcohol limit is .02% A single shot of liquor, or even a glass of beer will put you over. Then there are complicated rules and regulations about the quantities of liquor a bar can serve. No more than 2 cl per drink! Once I ordered a cocktail that was so diluted, that I asked if she could add an extra shot of gin. The bartender stared at me stonily and told me that would be against the law.
“Well, can I just order a single shot?”
She replied: “Yes, but you are not allowed to put that shot into your other drink!”
There are also stringent rules about buying alcohol. You can only buy beer in grocery stores. Wine and liquor are sold exclusively in the Vinmonopolet (Wine Monopoly) store, and outside the main cities, there is usually only one of these per town. They close around 3 p.m. on a Saturday and don’t reopen till Monday. All these rules are accepted because Norwegians take seriously the dangers of drunk driving and the negative social consequences of alcoholism.
Now, on to our five favorite cocktail bars, from south to north:
Himkok (Oslo)
This very sophisticated speakeasy is on a gritty downtown side street, marked by a single blue bulb above the doorway. There’s no sign. Just their logo — a stylized serpent slithering across a letter H — stenciled on the wall of the entrance. Inside it has a 1920's vibe: dark interior, chrome fixtures, bar staff in white jackets and ties.
Himkok means “moonshine,” and the bar has its own distillery. Their gin, vodka and aquavit are on tap, in large glass jars behind the bar connected by pipes that lead to the stills. It feels both illicit and luxurious. No wonder it has been ranked among the fifty best bars in the world.
The drinks were elegant and creative: clear primary colors, especially the red cherry-gin drink with a white-chocolate-coated cherry as a garnish. That’s a fancy-pants cocktail!
The Last Monkey (Bergen)
Two vacationing American college students recommended this bar to us in Norway’s second city, and they explained the obscure name: We all know the three monkeys, See-no-evil, Hear-no-evil, Speak-no-evil. The oft-forgotten last monkey is Do-no-evil. The bar has a fun vibe to it: very casual, with wood-plank walls and plastic greenery — more zoo than jungle.
We got there early in the evening, at opening time, and the lonely bartender, John, told us all about moving to Bergen from London, and his challenges learning Norwegian: his friends all switch to English whenever he shows up. The girls who recommended the place to us told us “you just tell the bartender what kind of a mood you are in, and he will make exactly the drink you want!” John was, frankly, a little baffled when we told him this story. (It might be that attractive young women get bespoke drinks). But, undeterred, John shook up some great classic cocktails for us: The D.L.B (a twist on the classic Clover Club, with elderflower liqueur) for Teresa, and a bespoke Last Word, with Chartreuse for me.
№3 (Mo I Rana)
Mo I Rana is a rough little town just south of the Arctic Circle. We despaired of finding a decent place to eat, let alone a bar with bespoke cocktails. We settled on №3 for dinner. Were they announcing they were the third best place to eat in this food wasteland? No, №3 is the street number. To our surprise, the restaurant consisted of tables wrapped around the massive central bar, with no fewer than three bartenders filling orders while the patrons dined. It was a Saturday night, and the place was packed. We were lucky to get a seat at the bar.
Our Romanian bartender served up a pair of drinks that would have done well in Paris. For me, the star was my passionfruit margarita. It was surprising enough to see fresh fruit anywhere in northern Norway. One is lucky to find a piece of melon at a buffet breakfast. To discover something as exotic as a passionfruit floating in a glass was really impressive. And, it tasted well balanced — not too sweet, which is often a risk in Norway, allowing the flavor of this delicate freshly-blended fruit to really stand up against the tequila and dance like they were doing the tango across my tongue and all the way down my throat.
The Misfit Tikki Bar (Tromsø).
A rum-based tikki bar above the Arctic Circle? The Misfit revels in its incongruity: rattan pillars and walls, bamboo ceiling. Pacific Island motifs are carved into the table stands, Island masks and shields for decor. Puffer-fish colored lights. They could have gotten away with mediocre drinks and still been a standout in the chilly town of Tromsø.
But, well-frothed by our Parisian bartender, the cocktails excelled! Their menu included a variety of original and modern “tiki-tails,” with great names like “Dr. Funk,” or the “Not Guilty,” and the one I had, the “Misfit Old Fashioned,” with Jamaican rum, banana rum and coconut liqueur. I know it sounds like treacle, but it was not too sweet at all. Teresa had the “Blossom,” with pink gin, basil, fresh blueberry cordial and guava foam. (pictured above) It had a deep ruby color and glowed like a jewel.
The FunkenLodge Bar (Longyearbyen, the Island of Svalbard).
Longyearben is the furthest-north town in the world, on roughly the same latitude as the north coast of Greenland. It’s an old mining town. These days, ecotourism and Arctic research are the twin drivers of the economy, but it still has a rough, wild-west feel to it. Our hotel, the Funken Lodge was an oasis of luxury, and their bar was surprising for two reasons: 1. The drinks were every bit as sophisticated as at the Himkok in Oslo. 2. They served the cheapest cocktails in Norway. Why? Because the government does not impose liquor taxes on Svalbard.
When we arrived at the hotel and dropped our bags, we decided to have lunch at the bar and were immediately intrigued by the “drink of the day,” the “Evergreen” — made with Monkey 47 gin, basil leaves, and egg white for the froth. The bar tender, Andrei, was from Ukraine (he had come to Longyearbyen long before the war started). He also made a mean pisco sour with a red peppercorn garnish (below right), one of Teresa’s favorite drinks.
My favorite “you-know-you’re-in-Norway” moment at the Funken Lodge was when the bartender looked out the large windows facing the bar, and casually remarked, “Oh look, an Arctic fox.” We turned and there it was, trotting across the back of the hotel. Just another day in Svalbard.
In sum, excellent cocktails may be few and far between in the land of the midnight sun. But with a little research and a lot of luck, we had some great experiences. One measure of a good drink is how long the pleasant taste of each sip stays on your tongue. By a similar standard, our best cocktail experiences in Norway were so unique, we remember them vividly, even months after the glasses are empty.
