The Oldest Restaurant in America Was Run by a Pirate and Is Older Than the Country

The White Horse Tavern isn’t just old, it’s basically a time machine with a menu. It’s been serving people since 1673, and the building itself predates that, built around 1652 as a private home before it turned into a tavern.

And the cast of characters? Wild. Then the place passed to Mayes’s sister, Mary, and later the Nichols family, where Jonathan Nichols hung the white horse sign out front and made it the kind of public house that ran the colony’s politics.

But the story gets even messier when you learn there’s a second “oldest” title, and it depends on whether the restaurant was truly running nonstop.

The Oldest Restaurant in America

The numbers alone are staggering. The White Horse Tavern has been operating since 1673, which also makes it about the 10th oldest restaurant in the world. The building itself is even older, built around 1652 as a private home before being converted into a tavern.

Its history reads like an adventure novel. One of its first tavernkeepers was William Mayes, a notorious pirate who operated in the Red Sea and returned to Newport with his bounty, openly protected by townspeople who did not much care what the British authorities thought.

The tavern then passed to Mayes's sister, Mary, and stayed in the Nichols family for roughly 200 years. It was Jonathan Nichols who hung a white horse sign out front, the universal colonial symbol of a public house, and gave the place its name around 1730.

In colonial America, a tavern was not just a bar. It was the center of public life, and the White Horse was no exception. For nearly a century it served as the meeting place of the colony's General Assembly, its Criminal Court, and its City Council. Councilmen would dine there and charge their meals to the public treasury, which makes the White Horse arguably the birthplace of the expensed business lunch.

By the 20th century the building had fallen into disrepair, and it was nearly demolished. The Preservation Society of Newport County stepped in during the 1950s, restored it, and ran it as a restaurant to fund the upkeep. Today it serves upscale fare, beef Wellington, duck, local seafood, in a 17th-century building whose floors are said to be made from the timber of colonial-era ships.

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And yes, the White Horse was also where councilmen could dine, then charge it to the public treasury, so the “business lunch” has colonial roots.

The Oldest Continuously Operating Restaurant

Here the "oldest" question splits, the way it always does, on a single word: continuously. The White Horse is the oldest restaurant overall, but it had interruptions in its long life.

The title of oldest continuously operating restaurant in America belongs to a different place, in Boston: the Union Oyster House. It has been serving diners without a break since 1826, when it opened as the Atwood & Bacon Oyster House, and it is the oldest restaurant known to have operated continuously in the United States.

The building it occupies is older still, dating to around 1716, and it is one of the oldest brick buildings in Boston. The semicircular oyster bar installed in 1826 is still there. Walking through the front door, locals say, is like stepping onto a colonial stage set.

The restaurant was named a National Historic Landmark in 2003, a status it shares with the White Horse, and both belong to a small club of American buildings that have served food across three centuries. The story of these historic eating houses is inseparable from the story of the oldest buildings in the world, because a restaurant can only be as old as the walls around it.

The Famous Guests and the Stranger History

What makes these old restaurants worth visiting is not just their age. It is the parade of history that passed through their doors.

The Union Oyster House has fed an extraordinary roster of Americans. The Kennedy family were regulars, and you can still ask to sit in JFK's favorite booth upstairs. The statesman Daniel Webster was a fixture, reportedly downing at least six plates of oysters, washed down with brandy and water, on a regular basis.

Stranger still, in 1796 the exiled future king of France, Louis Philippe, lived on the second floor and earned money giving French lessons to Boston's upper-class ladies. The restaurant even has a claim on a small piece of everyday life: the toothpick.

Around 1890, an entrepreneur named Charles Forster is said to have popularized the toothpick in America by paying well-dressed Harvard students to dine at the Union Oyster House and loudly demand them after their meals, creating instant demand. Whether or not every detail is true, it is the kind of story that clings to a place that has been around long enough to accumulate legends, the sort of trivia that fills any good collection of true food facts.

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That’s when William Mayes’s pirate past starts to feel less like trivia and more like the tavern’s unofficial origin story.

Rhode Island is also home to the kind of survival story you see in the state with the longest name and its Gilded Age palaces.

Then the Nichols family era kicks in, with Jonathan Nichols putting up the white horse sign around 1730, turning a local gathering spot into something that sounded official from the start.

The Other Old Giants of American Dining

The White Horse and the Union Oyster House top the list, but New England and the original colonies are dotted with eating houses old enough to have served the founding generation.

In Vermont, the Dorset Inn opened in 1796, originally called the Washington Hotel and built to resemble George Washington's Mount Vernon estate. Guests once tied their horses at the front door before sitting down to a supper pulled from the kitchen garden and the backyard livestock.

In New Hampshire, the Hancock Inn dates to 1789, the year Washington became president. Boston's Bell in Hand Tavern, which traces its origins to 1795, is often called one of the oldest taverns in the country and adds to the city's remarkable density of historic watering holes.

These places survived for the same unglamorous reasons. They sat on well-traveled routes, they adapted as transportation changed from horses to railroads to automobiles, and they kept feeding people through wars, depressions, and fashions. The Dorset Inn expanded as car travel and skiing turned Vermont into a vacation destination. Survival, for an old restaurant, is less about a single famous dish than about quietly staying useful for two hundred years.

After the Preservation Society of Newport County saved the place in the 1950s, the “oldest” debate finally lands on a single word: continuously, and Boston’s Union Oyster House jumps into the frame.

Tavern, Restaurant, and the World's Oldest

New England loves to argue about this, and the argument is really about definitions again. Should a colonial tavern that served food count as a "restaurant" in the modern sense? Does a place that closed for a few years still count as continuously operating?

These distinctions are why the White Horse and the Union Oyster House can both legitimately claim to be "the oldest," just with different qualifiers. The region is dense with contenders, and several of America's ten oldest eateries cluster in New England, a legacy of its early colonial wealth and its role as a hub of trade, the kind of concentrated prosperity that still shapes the richest cities in the United States.

To put American "old" in perspective, though, it helps to look abroad. The oldest restaurant in the entire world is Casa Botín in Madrid, Spain, which Guinness World Records recognizes as continuously operating since 1725. That means Spain's oldest restaurant is roughly a century younger than America's White Horse Tavern, a rare case where a New World establishment out-ages an Old World one. The difference comes down to how each defines a "restaurant," but it is a fun reversal of the usual pattern.

The word "restaurant" itself is the key to the puzzle. In its modern sense, a place with a menu where you sit and order a meal for money, the restaurant is a relatively recent invention, often traced to 18th-century Paris. By that strict definition, almost nothing is older than the 1700s, which is why Casa Botín can hold the global title despite the existence of much older inns and taverns.

Eating houses, alehouses, and roadside inns are far older, stretching back to the ancient world, but they were not quite "restaurants" as we use the word now. So the question of the oldest restaurant is, once again, a question about definitions hiding inside a question about history.

That is what makes the American examples so interesting. The White Horse Tavern and the Union Oyster House sit right on the blurry line between old-world tavern and modern restaurant. They began as colonial public houses, places to drink, sleep, and conduct business, and gradually became the sit-down restaurants we would recognize today, without ever closing the doors for good. They are living fossils of the transition itself.

America's restaurant history is younger than Europe's by most measures, but cities like New York and Boston hold their own surprising depth of culinary history, from colonial taverns to centuries-old oyster bars, a thread that runs through any tour of New York's own fascinating past.

The remarkable thing about these places is not just that they are old. It is that they are still open. You can walk into the White Horse Tavern tonight and eat dinner in a room where a pirate once poured drinks and a colonial court once met, and where George Washington himself is said to have dined. Most history sits behind glass in a museum. At the oldest restaurants in America, you can pull up a chair to it and order the oysters.

The White Horse Tavern wins the age flex, but the nonstop argument is where the real fight starts.

Want older-than-everything chaos too? See the scientists who killed the 507-year-old clam.