Caru’ cu bere is the perfect restaurant in Bucharest where you can enjoy tradional romanian food, made from recipes created decades ago, along with the house beer, an unique nad well kept recipe, all of this in a place loaded with history and tradition.
Even though Caru’ cu bere is widely known as a symbol of Bucharest, its original founders came from beyond the mountains, in Transylvania. In 1879, on the Calea Victoriei boulevard, there was a beerhouse under the name of La Carul cu Bere (at the beer wagon), ran by transylvanian native Ion Cabasanu. The origin of the name is not a hard guess, as the beer was brought to the beerhouse by horse-driven wagons.
In this place, Ion and Gheorghe Mircea, the nephews of Ion Cabasanu, who also came from Transylvania, were practicing the beer brewing craftmanship, later being joined by their younger sibling, Nicolae Mircea. For some years, all the three brothers worked hard and managed to get hold on several places in the area of the Villacros Passage, also in the field of beer brewing. With a bolder attitude towards his work, Nicolae Mircea manages to see his dream come true in the year of 1899 when he starts the construction of the Caru’ cu bere building, the famous restaurant in the heart of Bucharest.
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The project of Zigfried Kofsinsky, the architect of the building, was so well put together that the owner of the building and the founder of the beerhous, Nicoale Mircea, was honored by King Carol I of Romania himself with two of the highest honers given at the time by the State of Romania. Today, the building is recognized as an architectural and historical monument.
More than 100 years have passed over the famous restaurant in Bucharest’s old town, but this doesn’t mean we didn’t keep up with the times. Some things were changed, so that we won’t be considered to rusty, be what we wouldn’t change never and ever is the house beer, which is the exactly the same beer that the founder of Caru’ cu bere brought from Germany to leave as a legacy for the generations to come.
But we wouldn’t be able to call ourselves a restaurant if we served only beer, right? Thank God, we have a diverse food menu able to please the most pretentions of people. See the full menu here.
During the decades good things and bad things happend to our restaurant. The worst times happened in 1948, when the newly installed communist regime took over the restaurant without any notice. The owner were told that they have a few days to hand over the restaurant to the municipality of Bucharest and things were never the same again.
Only in 1999 things started to look brighter, as the nephews of Nicoale Mircea got back the ownership of the restaurant from the public domain. In 2006, after extensive restorations, the restaurant is reopened in partnership with the City Grill Group.
The reopening of the restaurant in Bucharest is not just the opening of a physical location, but is also a door you can open and a table at which to sit at. The reopening of the restaurant is a symbol of the commitment of Nicolae Mircea’s heirs and the City Grill Group to continue keeping the soul of Bucharest alive.
Things may change, people come and go, habbits may transform, but, as they say, every city has a soul of its own, and Bucharest’s soul is more alive than ever. You may look for it anywhere you want, but you won’t be able to find it more tangible in any place ales than Caru’ cu bere.
