Bars in Groningen: Where to Drink

Groningen has less a bar scene than a bar organism, and it pulses hardest around one square and two narrow streets. Tens of thousands of students keep it fed, and they treat a Tuesday like a Friday. Start on the cobbles of the Grote Markt as the terraces fill, then let the crowd pull you sideways into the tighter, older streets where the real drinking happens.

The Grote Markt: loud, central, and where everyone starts

The Grote Markt is Groningen’s living room. The square was flattened in the final weeks of the Second World War and rebuilt, and it is now ringed by cafés with wide terraces, with the Martinitoren keeping watch over all of it. A night out almost always begins here, less because it’s the best drinking in the city than because it’s the meeting point. It’s easy to find, easy to point a taxi toward later, and big enough that “see you on the Markt” never fails. De Drie Gezusters, sprawling across one side of the square, is the classic first stop: an enormous, unapologetically studenty complex of connected rooms and a courtyard, built to swallow a huge crowd on a Thursday without blinking. Expect a small glass of pils (a vaasje, roughly 250ml) for somewhere around €2.50–3.50, more on the terrace during a festival weekend. Nobody comes here for the cocktail list. They come because it’s the switchboard for the rest of the night.

Poelestraat and Peperstraat: the real backbone

Peel off the square onto Poelestraat and you’ve found the city’s actual nightlife spine: a tight run of bars, clubs and late-night kroegen that gets loud early and stays loud. It’s brasher than the Markt, with more neon and more queueing outside doors after midnight, and much of Groningen’s clubbing and DJ-bar culture concentrates here. Peperstraat runs roughly parallel and connects near the Markt. It is narrower and older in character, and home to some of the city’s proeflokalen, the traditional Dutch tasting houses built for jenever and bitters rather than beer towers. Here the mood shifts from student bar crawl to something closer to old Groningen: dark wood, small glasses, a shelf of bottles that hasn’t changed much in decades. A shot of jenever runs roughly €2.50–3.50, and the etiquette is fixed. It’s poured to the brim in a small tulip glass, and you bend down to take the first sip at the bar before picking the glass up, never the other way round. Get this backwards and the bartender will good-naturedly tell you so.

Jenever, bitters, and the Hooghoudt thread

Serious drinking in Groningen eventually brings you face to face with Hooghoudt, the city's own distillery, running since the 1880s and still producing jenever and fruit liqueurs rooted in the region. A number of bars in the centre serve Hooghoudt as their house jenever, and a tasting café bears the name itself. There you can work through the lineup, from the clean, juniper-driven oude jenever to the sweeter fruit gins, the way it’s meant to be done: small glasses, unhurried, on your feet, ideally with an order of bitterballen on its way. If you try only one "local" drink in Groningen, make it this one instead of yet another imported lager.

Student rhythm: vrijmibo and the term-time tide

Groningen’s drinking calendar follows the university, not the tourist season. The Rijksuniversiteit Groningen and the Hanzehogeschool account for a huge share of the city’s population, so the bars fill on a rhythm built around lectures and deadlines rather than weather. Vrijmibo (vrijdagmiddagborrel, the Friday-afternoon drink) starts absurdly early, often from 4 or 5pm, and spills students out of libraries straight onto the terraces of the Grote Markt and Poelestraat while it’s still daylight. Term time (September to June, with a dip around exams) is when the city is loudest and cheapest. Happy-hour boards and cheap-pils nights are aimed squarely at students, and a first-round beer can dip toward €2. In summer, when the students scatter, the same bars feel roomier and a touch more expensive on average, and the main square is noticeably more touristic.

Away from the Markt: quieter, older, better conversation

When the crowds around the main square and Poelestraat turn into a rugby scrum, head for the quieter streets near the Vismarkt and the northern edge of the centre by the A-kerk, in the area known as A-Kwartier, one of the city's oldest quarters. Groningen’s small, licensed red-light windows are also in the old centre, so it pays to know the etiquette. The bars scattered through this part of town are calmer, more local and less obviously built for a stag weekend, and you can actually hear whoever you're drinking with. The rules around the windows are simple and non-negotiable: the women working there are professionals doing legal work, photographing them is completely out of the question, and treating the street as a spectacle instead of a workplace is the quickest way to mark yourself as a tourist who didn't bother to learn the basics.

Practical notes for the first round

• Ordering: at the bar (as opposed to table service on a terrace), you order and pay directly, in cash or by card. Most places now take card without a minimum, though smaller proeflokalen sometimes prefer cash for rounds under €5.
• Tipping: optional, as service is included. Rounding up or leaving a euro or two on a tab is appreciated, not expected, and nobody will chase you for more.
• Closing times: on weeknights many bars wind down around 1am. On Thursday (a de facto student weekend night in Groningen), Friday and Saturday, the busier streets run to 3–4am, later for clubs.
• Terraces: claiming a terrace seat without ordering is frowned upon once it’s busy. Staff will come to you, but don’t linger empty-handed on a packed evening.
• Smoking: smoking is banned inside all bars and cafés nationwide. Terraces and the designated spots outside bar doors are where the crowds gather between rounds, which is useful to know if you’re looking for someone in a packed venue.