Regular customer Wim orders his second herring of the day. It’s 10:30 am. “I’ve been coming here since it opened, so for forty-five years now. Just calculate how many herring I’ve eaten here,” he laughs.
Wim is one of the loyal customers who came to say goodbye to Haringstal de Zeevang in the Hoofddorppleinbuurt in Zuid today. Owner Lucien Gudde is open for the last time today, before his retirement begins. “It will be crazy,” he says as he removes the bones from a herring. “But I’ve been doing this since I was eighteen, so I’m looking forward to doing other things. I have accordion lessons and I just became a grandfather.”
Succession
The neighborhood will miss Lucien, but so will the other way around. “I now see people with their children, whom I used to see as babies. That’s nice to see, but then you also think: I’m getting old.”
To the great sadness of the neighborhood, there will be no successor. Lucien’s son was a candidate for a while, but decided to drop out after a while. According to his father, this also had to do with new European procurement rules, which make passing on a stall uncertain. “That could mean that he has to leave the stall again in a few years. He didn’t want to risk that. So he is now a train driver. Also a great job.”
