December 1, 2018 · Menno Hoexum
Café Wolthoorn & Co is celebrating its 95th anniversary this month, and hundreds of regular guests have celebrated it exuberantly. A remarkable age for a hospitality business in the city center of Groningen. Wolthoorn & Co With this, it joins a small list of special traditional pubs that have brilliantly weathered all the changes of the past decades. It should be noted, however, that owner Arnold Ensing considers his establishment to be something more than just a traditional pub.
"The term 'brown café' does not do justice to the efforts we, as a team, make to ensure our guests have a good time. An extensive selection of specialty beers and wines, and—not unimportantly—knowledgeable table service. We maintain the tradition of dressing our staff in black trousers, a white shirt, a waistcoat, and a bow tie. All of this gives the establishment more cachet than an ordinary brown café, and our guests greatly appreciate that," concludes Ensing.
The café owes its name to Henk Wolthoorn, who took over the respectable middle-class establishment ‘Het Bierhuis’ and promptly had his own name painted on the windows. In a short time, he managed to transform the business into a regulars' pub for a mixed crowd consisting of journalists, artists, performers, students, professors, politicians, and people in their thirties and forties from home and abroad. After all these years, little has changed.
From the moment Henk Wolthoorn stepped behind the bar, the café gained more than just local and regional fame. Anyone wishing to revisit this illustrious history should try to find the 200-page book that was published in 1988 in an edition of 750 copies to mark the 65th anniversary. There are too many events and anecdotes in that long history to summarize in a few words.
It is almost impossible to find a café anymore where an imposing billiard table takes center stage and is still played daily. A nice observation is made by biologist and author Midas Dekker, who places Café Wolthoorn & Co. in the same category as Café Welling in Amsterdam, the barroom of a hotel. Van der Werff on Schiermonnikoog and café and society The Key in Groningen. He had this recorded in the jubilee book in 1988 and repeated this hymn of praise in his work published this year. book Full License in which he describes all the special brown pubs still existing in the Netherlands in his own unique way.
Arnold Ensing refutes the concern Dekker expresses about the decline of the traditional brown café. "It is mainly the old, smaller neighborhood pubs that are disappearing. A café like Wolthoorn & Co. will have a right to exist for years to come. You have to cherish history, but at the same time move with the times. That is why we constantly ask ourselves what the guest wants and appreciates. We have made small changes to the interior from time to time, but we always take into account how the regulars might react to them."
Ensing is convinced that he will also live to see the café's 100th anniversary as the landlord in 2023. In the year of the centenary, he will then be able to call himself the owner for nineteen years, thereby surpassing the thirteen years that his father Herman ran the café (from 1991 to 2004). Initially, Arnold took over the café from their father in 2004 together with his brother Jeroen, but eight years later the younger of the two chose a different path in life and left De Wolthoorn—as regulars call the café—to his older brother.
Between the departure of Henk Wolthoorn in 1970 and the arrival of Herman Ensing in 1991, the café was in the hands of renowned landlords such as Jan Wilner (1970-1977), Auke Hylkema (1977-1980),
Koos Huizenga (1980-1982) and Lacko Benedek (1982-1991). In 1980, Koos Huizenga had & Co painted after the name.
