The catering couple who enthusiastically started a new restaurant at the Kniphorst recreational park in Anloo last year have already left. The duo barely lasted a year. Disagreements about agreements made with the owner about management and dissatisfaction about the ins and outs of the park are the main reasons for the departure of operators Willem Henneke and Monique Degen.
“It’s a mess,” Henneke shouts. “This is a failed project, really worthless.” The entrepreneur is especially angry and frustrated that, as a catering operator, he was ultimately not given the opportunity to manage the recreation park together with his wife, where they would have been assigned the manager’s home. Everything turned out differently.
“At the time, we agreed with the new park owner that we would also receive people at the park as host and hostess, as the manager couple. But suddenly they put someone else forward, without us knowing about it. It then became very bad for us. difficult to earn a good living here,” says Henneke.
Furthermore, it is ‘still a big mess’ at the recreation park, he grumbles. “Some innovations are being made here and there, but that is a piecemeal affair, everything is moving painfully slowly. I’m glad I’m out of that mess.”
At the beginning of last year, Henneke and his wife embarked on the new catering adventure at Recreatiepark Kniphorst, once famous and infamous as Camping Anloo. The campsite with around two hundred mobile homes and chalets was in the news due to bankruptcy and dangerous conditions with electricity and gas. Dozens of illegal camping residents were left out in the cold after the park was cut off from electricity, gas and later water for safety reasons.
Northern real estate entrepreneur Rachid Benhaddou bought the moribund complex for €400,000 during an auction at the end of 2020. He wants to patch up the recreation park bit by bit and make it beautiful again. Willem Henneke and Monique Degen saw good opportunities for themselves when they heard about the future plans. They left their restaurant in Eext behind, because they really liked the combination of restaurant and campsite management in Anloo.
They renovated the run-down restaurant area at the front of the recreation complex and renamed it Brasserie Lloyd’s, named after a deceased Surinamese comrade. But within a year, all the effort, energy and money they put into it appears, according to Henneke, to have been ‘completely for nothing’. “All in all we have invested 130,000 euros in it. But for what?”
They are claiming 90,000 euros back from the park owner through their lawyer. This is to compensate for the money they spent on the restaurant and the new kitchen that they were unable to take with them when they left. “This has become one big disappointment. They only have nice talk here. This is certainly not going to be a luxury park. From the front it seems like a lot, but the further you get into the park, the worse it gets,” says Henneke.
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