Kwakelaars are standing up for snack bar owner Greg van Leeuwen of Greg’s Snacks. The entrepreneur is looking for a place where he can sell snacks as long as his building is under maintenance, but according to him, the municipality is not keen on a temporary snack bar in the heart of the village.
Greg founded his snack bar a year and a half ago when he was only twenty years old. In a short time the restaurant became a great success. The young entrepreneur knew from the start that he would have to move temporarily at some point, because the building in which the snack bar is located is being demolished and rebuilt.
Now the entrepreneur is looking for a favorable place where he can place a container from which he can sell snacks in the coming year. “The village center has just been cleaned up, which made it very difficult to reach us. So I have had really poor turnover for four months,” Greg explains to NH why the need for a prominent place is great. “Sometimes we were simply not reachable at all, in the months of May to September. A lot of cyclists always visit us.”
Greg prefers to place his temporary snack cart prominently on the Village Square, but the municipality always suggests to him ‘spots somewhere at the back of a neighborhood’. She thinks that Greg should first prove that Kwakel residents want the snack bar in the village center in the coming year. Greg is now investigating this with a petition.
Many Kwakel residents react enthusiastically: in three days the petition has already been signed more than seven hundred times. Some of the signatories wrote in a response why they support Greg. “The snack bar is a household name in our village of De Kwakel. A good young hardworking entrepreneur. This is where his passion lies. De Kwakel and the surrounding area cannot do without Greg’s Snacks,” Lisette writes, for example.
Bami block with chili sauce
“Support the small independent entrepreneurs. They have suffered enough losses during the corona period,” says Lydia. Toine ‘thinks it is important for the village that there is a restaurant that is centrally located.’ “Especially because food can be obtained quickly. This increases the quality of life in De Kwakel.” For Thomas, the reason is simple: “I always want to be able to get a bami block with chili sauce as close to the village as possible.”
Greg is pleased that so many Kwakelaars support him. “I belong in the village,” he says. When asked, the municipality of Uithoorn stated that it encourages the petition and that the Dorpsplein is certainly still an option.