Tales of the Table · Lost Tables · Tryggvagata 20 · 1990–c. 2016
Glaumbar: twenty-odd years of live music on Tryggvagata
Ask anyone who went out in Reykjavík in the nineties and they will remember the stretch of Tryggvagata where Glaumbar and Gaukur á Stöng stood side by side.
Glaumbar opened in 1990 – not to be confused with Glaumbær, the sixties club by the pond – right next door to Gaukur á Stöng, the country's first pub. It was the work of restaurateur Tómas Tómasson, who had opened the Hard Rock Café three years earlier, and it arrived a year after beer was legalised. These were the golden years of the bar scene and the dance-band circuit, and Glaumbar was a loud, packed room where live bands were a regular part of the night.
In the summer of 2010, after twenty years, the old Glaumbar closed its chapter: saxophonist Steinar Sigurðarson, who has played with everyone from Sigur Rós to Stuðmenn, rebuilt the room with a new stage as Risið – a place made for musicians. The Glaumbar name soon came back, though. In 2012 it was one of the venues of the Reykjavík Live festival, alongside the old Gaukurinn and Prikið, and in 2016 it was one of four bars allowed to stay open through the night to show the Super Bowl.
The business changed hands more than once. In the autumn of 2016 the building went up for sale and Glaumbar quietly disappeared from the city's bar listings; the last operating company was declared bankrupt in January 2020. Another club uses the rooms today – but for a generation of Reykjavík night owls, that corner of Tryggvagata will always be Glaumbar.
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