St. Hanshaugen: Start of the Affluent West Oslo

St. Hanshaugen, the borough named after St. Hanshaugen Park, connects the city core to Oslo’s affluent western side. The park was originally built on a bare rock hill where people in the olden days gathered to celebrate the summer solstice. Flanked by the Akerselva river, with the park sitting at its heart, this area is well known for its lively and romantic atmosphere, dotted with green and open spaces.

The neighbourhood around St. Hanshaugen Park is particularly popular with young affluent couples. The Norwegian Crown Prince couple, Mette-Marit and Haakon, for example, used to live in this area and were often spotted hanging out in Java coffee bar next to the park. Renate Reinsve, a young and up-and-coming Norwegian actress with international recognition, also lives here. In an interview with Financial Times in late 2024, she mentioned Java as her favourite Oslo coffee shop “around the corner.” If you happen to be a Jo Nesbø fan, you probably already noticed that the restaurant Schrøder, a traditional Norwegian restaurant frequented by the fictional detective Harry Hole in his novels, is just a few steps away from the park.

Cafés in this area generally start to take on a more elegant vibe compared with the hipster charm on the city’s eastern side, and are not as busy as cafés in the city centre. Encore, a French pâtisserie, serves as a good example. Here, you can find some of the city’s most exquisite French cakes. Hernández, the shop that offers arguably Oslo’s best-known burnt Basque cheesecake, is also located right by the borough border.

Very few things can be more romantic than a stroll in the shade of the lush trees in St. Hanshaugen Park with your loved one on summer days—both of you assured that, just a few steps away, there are several nice cafés and bakeries worthy of your visit.

Encore

Croissant, pain au chocolat, pain suisse—it’s hard to imagine a city’s café scenes without the French pastries. It’s even harder to imagine a European city without any French pâtisseries. Encore, located on the edge bewteen St. Hanshaugen and Majorstuen, is exactly such a place in Oslo where you can find all kinds of exquisite French gâteaux and pastries. The Frenchman behind Encore is Théo Romer, who came to Oslo in 2015 for a job at Sebastien Bruno, a high-end chocolate chain named after one of the two owners. At that time, Romer was only 19 years old, at his last year of the pastry chef education in France, where he specialised in chocolate. Looking back today, chocolate has been the magical ingredient that played a central role throughout his career. ...

Java Kaffebar

Java has become a landmark coffee shop right by St. Hanshaugen park ever since it opened its doors in 1997. Its owner–and the main barista–Robert Thoresen, originally trained as an architect, is one of the leading figures of the third-wave coffee movement in the Oslo coffee scene. The original plan, according to Thoresen’s interviews with local newspapers, was that the coffee bar should serve as the front to his architecture studio. Yet Thoresen got so fascinated by the coffee business and went on to win a string of illustrious coffee-related titles including the first edition of the World Barista Championship in Morocco in 2000. ...