Mike van der Werk Owner
What brought you to Aruba? I always say “The KLM”. I’ve been here nineteen years. My business partner and I were bartenders in the south of Holland. He moved here and I visited him on vacation. A year later, I came again and got offered a job downtown at the Café the Plaza where he was the bartender. I worked a total of seven-and-a-half years, then this place came up and I talked him into it.
What was Bingo! like when it first opened? In the beginning we’d get about fifty people for dinner, and every night the bar was full until three, four, five in the morning. But back then we were the only place on this part of the island. Here, if a place does well, like we did, people try to copy it, which makes me proud.
Mike van der Werk – Owner
How has Bingo! changed over the years? Now we’ve got small portions and large portions, so you can order the main course as an appetizer and the appetizer as a main course. We’ve got a huge carpaccio and sometimes people come in and just order that. In twelve years, I’ve only gotten two complaints that we didn’t serve enough food. And I have a better chef now. I wanted it to be like a bistro, a casual place, but the food had to be really good, and my chef, Harold van den Burg did that. He’s the best chef on the island. We’ve also become more of a restaurant than a bar. But we still have our local people and the tourists we know – all the customers who’ve been coming for twelve years. I stand behind my place, my staff, my kitchen. People say it feels like coming home, and that’s what I like.
What are your most popular dishes? The beef, pork, and chicken brochettes. They’re marinated and a little spicy. There’s the grouper – that’s always popular. We’ve got the best burger on the island. And we do a lamb stew instead of a lamb rack because a rack would be really expensive and we’re not the place for that. That’s important to me, that people come here and have a good evening, get the bill and feel good about it.
You serve traditional Dutch dishes on Tuesdays? Every Tuesday night we have a Dutch specialty: vegetables, mashed potatoes, and gravy with sausage, meatballs or chicken. It’s $10 and we get a lot of people who come in for it every week. For that amount of money, they figure it’s better than going to the grocery store.
What’s the story of the poffertjes dessert?
How did you come up with the name Bingo!?
The little Dutch pancake. They’re really small and they’re pan-fried with real butter and served with powdered sugar. I love it. It’s nothing fancy. It’s actually for little kids, but I get people at the bar who say “Mike, I want to know what the little pancakes are!” It’s something really familiar to Dutch people.
It was a heavy night out. A good friend and I came home and we were watching a movie – I think it was one of The Naked Gun films with Leslie Nielsen – and it said Bingo!. And the next day I woke up and I called my friend and said “I don’t know why, but it’s Bingo!.” It’s a stupid name, but people talked so much about our name because it was so stupid that it wasn’t so bad at all. And now they say “It’s a genius name. How’d you come up with it?” It’s the same thing with our location, actually. People said it’s stupid to be in the middle of a parking lot next to a gas station. But we get a very decent rent here. That’s why we can charge decent prices. And now everyone likes Bingo!. I’m Mike Bingo!.
Is the crowd mostly Dutch? No, we’ve got a nice mixture. People call us The Mocamba Place, The Dutch Place, because the other owner and I are both Dutch. But we’ve been here twenty and twenty-two years on the island. We’re not even Dutch anymore! Though last night some people thought I was Australian. Sometimes we play Dutch music because we get tourists from Holland. They go on vacation, travel 9000 km, and want to hear Dutch music.
What’s the helmet on the railing over there? That’s a go-karting event we do every year with the staff and the customers called Bingo! Racing and Ribs. You pay your ticket and we bring some snacks and drinks and go to a track and race go-karts. Afterwards, we come back here and eat spare ribs. When you do gokarting in Holland, it’s competitive. But here the computer at the track won’t be working or one kart won’t be working. That’s the nice part because everybody’s like “I’m going to win!” and then it doesn’t matter. You see people going the wrong way. And the winner gets the hat, which is just a helmet with a miniature car on top that I spray-painted gold.
2017 ARUBA RESTAURANT GUIDE
BINGO! CAFÉ & RESTAURANT PALM BEACH 6D | NOORD
(297) 586-2818 www.bingoaruba.com
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