A Jordanian brown bar is a continuous performance and Sara Ruwaard-Blommers, better known as Blonde Sien, was on stage there for 82 years. In café Rooie Nelis in the Laurierstraat in Amsterdam, surrounded by walls full of photos from her life, she grew into ‘at the same time attendant and director of her own living museum’, as regular guest Karel Eykman describes her in The tooth of Rooie Nelis and more stories by Blonde Sien†
Rooie Nelis was her father’s nickname, her mother was Rooie Sien. Blonde Sien was born in Amsterdam in 1927. Red Nelis worked in the coal harbour, but earned too little. That is why her mother started the café in 1937, with savings and a loan of 750 guilders. Blonde Sien ended up behind the bar when she was thirteen.
At that time, the cafe opened at 6 a.m. seven days a week. Rooie and Blonde Sien did almost everything, Eykman writes, because Rooie Nelis suffered from inflammation of the blood vessels. For lack of medicine, he drank until he was an alcoholic. When he went to a boxing match or on a trip to the cafe, Blonde Sien was told by her mother ‘to make sure things didn’t get out of hand’. Yet they were very fond of each other.
King and queen
In 1944, Blonde Sien became pregnant by a young man she had fallen in love with. They were supposed to get married, but he was soon arrested by the Germans and shot dead in the panic surrounding Mad Tuesday. In 1956 she started dating Gerrit Blommers, a boy from the Jordaan who was called her Zwarte Gerrit because of his forest. They would marry after 32 years. They lived above the cafe and, to the amusement of their clientele, could argue flowerly. ‘Two cute people’, says folk singer Davey Bindervoet, who came to Rooie Nelis as a child and later regularly assisted behind the bar. ‘Together the king and queen of the café and apart from each other very different.’
Writer Eli Asser also often appeared in Rooie Nelis. The cafe would become the inspiration for his hit TV series The sheep with the five legsBlonde Sien played along as an extra. The later Prime Minister Jan-Peter Balkenende also came there, it was the favorite pub of his student fraternity PASCAL, of which Blonde Sien would become an honorary member. Beatrix once had coffee in Rooie Nelis.
Typical innkeeper
After the death of her mother in 1996, Blonde Sien took over the cafe. “As soon as someone entered the cafe, she knew who that person was,” says Davey Bindervoet. ‘She could read people like a psychologist and then give them the treatment that suited them like an entertainer. Those kind of innkeepers are typical of a Jordanian bar, but they are dying out.’
Blonde Sien sat at the bar until 2019, when her health and that of Zwarte Gerrit no longer allowed her to keep the cafe open. Zwarte Gerrit died a few months later. Blonde Sien spent her last years in a nursing home in Egmond aan Zee, where she died on April 10, aged 94.
She leaves behind two children and a series of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. According to The Telegraph there is disagreement about the inheritance. A matter of millions, because it is not only about the cafe, but also a few adjacent buildings. ‘I don’t understand why there isn’t some kind of foundation to keep this cafe,’ says Davey Bindervoet. “Soon it will go back to a yup who buys everything.”