Café Wolthoorn & Co celebrates its 95th anniversary this month and the hundreds of regular guests have celebrated this exuberantly. A remarkable age for a catering company in the city center of Groningen. Wolthoorn & Co thus joins a small list of special brown cafes that have withstood all the changes in recent decades with flying colors. It should be noted that manager Arnold Ensing thinks his company is something more than a brown café.
,,The name 'brown café' does not do justice to the efforts we make as a team to make the guest happy. An extensive range of special beers and wines and, not unimportantly, table service with expertise. We maintain the custom of dressing our ministry in black trousers, white shirt, waistcoat and bow tie. All this gives the business more cachet than an ordinary brown café and the guest appreciates that very much'', concludes Ensing.
Henk Wolthoorn
The café owes its name to Henk Wolthoorn who took over the neat bourgeois establishment 'Het Bierhuis' and promptly had his own name painted on the windows. In a short time he managed to transform the company into a favorite pub for a mixed audience consisting of journalists, artists, students, professors, politicians and people in their thirties and forties from home and abroad. Not much has changed after all these years.
From the moment Henk Wolthoorn started working behind the tap, the café gained more than local and regional fame. Anyone wishing to re-examine this illustrious history should find the 200-page book that was published in 1988 on the occasion of its 65th anniversary in an edition of 750 copies. There are too many events and anecdotes in that long history to summarize in a few words now.
Hardly anywhere can you find a café where an impressive billiards table is central to the business, which is still played daily. It is nice to note that biologist and author Midas Dekker found café Wolthoorn & Co. joins the list of café Welling in Amsterdam, the hotel's taproom Van der Weff at Schiermonnikoog and café and society The key in Groningen. He had that recorded in the anniversary book in 1988 and repeated this hymn in his publications this year book Full License in which he describes all existing special brown cafes in the Netherlands in his own way.
Arnold Ensing contradicts Dekker's concern about the loss of the brown café. “It is mainly the old, smaller neighborhood bars that are disappearing. A cafe like Wolthoorn & Co. will last for years to come. You have to cherish the history, but at the same time move with the times. That is why we constantly ask ourselves what the guest wants and appreciates. We've made small changes to the interior from time to time, but always keep in mind how the regular guests might react to them."
Ensing is convinced that in 2023 he will also experience the café's 100th anniversary as a castellan. He may call himself the owner for nineteen years in the year of the centenary, surpassing the thirteen years that his father Herman (from 1991 to 2004) ran the café. Arnold initially took over the café from his father in 2004 together with his brother Jeroen, but eight years later the younger of the two chose a different course of life and De Wolthoorn left the café to his older brother, just like regular guests do.
Between the departure of Henk Wolthoorn in 1970 and the arrival of Herman Ensing in 1991, the café was in the hands of illustrious innkeepers such as Jan Wilner (1970-1977), Auke Hylkema (1977-1980),
Koos Huizenga (1980-1982) and Lacko Benedek (1982-1991). Koos Huizenga had & Co painted after the name in 1980.