Freddie Janssen: ‘It’s empowering to tell the stories of women in hospitality’

Freddie Janssen’s much-loved Dalston cafe and restaurant Snackbar is, fundamentally, a love letter to her home country, the Netherlands. Particularly its largest city, Amsterdam, where so-called “snackbars” are rife, and cherished for their high quality fast food.

“A snack bar is kind of like a Dutch version of a fish and chip shop. Like a hole in the wall kind of place,” Janssen tells me. “So a snack is that idea of fast food, but it’s very high quality, amazing, beautiful ingredients, and not cooked fast, because everything is homemade. Everything’s made from scratch. In the Netherlands, the snack bars, where you just get fries and everything is basically deep fried – deep fried sausages, deep fried cheese – all the food is in the vending machine. So you put in a coin and you take it out like that. It’s got a dark kitchen behind it essentially.”

Janssen’s Dalston iteration is a little more established than that. It has tables and chairs, a shopfront you can enter and a suntrap courtyard out the back. It’s a dinky space, perhaps an idea that heralds from its namesake, but it also feels like a place to sit, eat and catch up with friends. A place to linger over a coffee or a glass of wine or one of Janssen’s epic margaritas. It’s been a journey to get the café to where it is now, though. “I opened five months before Covid,” she says. “So it was really just getting set up. The weeks before Covid hit us, I was like, ‘Oh, cool, it’s getting busy, I think this is working’.I had this team of, I think, eight people that did many different shifts. And then it all just changed completely.”

In order to adapt to the changing times, Janssen quickly turned Snackbar into a store, selling everything from groceries to coffee. “I was like, ‘OK, well I’ll just turn Snackbar into a shop then’,” says Janssen. “I moved my espresso machine from the back into the front room, so it seemed really inviting when you walked past. I’m selling loads of Mexican groceries, and toilet roll and flour, because I was like, ‘Well, everyone around here sold out. Everyone’s closed, you can’t get anything at the Co-op next door.’”

“We sold out of flour, because our supplier had run out of the one kilo barrels,” she continues. “So I thought, ‘OK, I’ll get the 25 kilo bag’. I put the scales in the middle of the cafe, and I was just weighing up flour for people. I feel like you have to – we’ve all had to – reinvent ourselves and our business so many times.” It was no mean feat, and the constant adaptation was exhausting. Even in December, when we almost went back into lockdown, Janssen admits feeling like she didn’t have it in her to go through it again.

While, thankfully, that didn’t happen, Snackbar is still in a period of revival and survival, much like many hospitality businesses in the capital at the moment. “Just in terms of my team and what that looks like, it’s really, really become a very skeleton crew,” says Janssen. “I do everything – I do the deep clean, I do all my orders, I do all the menu development. I do all the cooking. I’m in the kitchen by myself at the moment. And then I’ve got my front of house people. It’s very hands on. I essentially do everything – I do the marketing, I do Instagram, I do... I do everything.

“I didn’t really imagine for things to be like that,” she admits. “I’m doing very long days. I think when you own your own business, you own a restaurant, you don’t really stop, and I’ve really noticed that I think especially because of Covid that – I mean, I have quite a good work ethic, and I enjoy working hard, but I’ve really found that you can’t stand still and you constantly have to be like, ‘OK, are we going to do menu boxes? Are we gonna do some events? Are we going to have collaborations?’ You have to constantly do something new.”

And while Janssen may be a one woman band in many ways, she has had an incredibly encouraging team over the years, one that I’m interested to hear has been entirely made up of women. “My team has always been female,” she tells me. “It’s not something that I’ve done on purpose, but I’ve just really enjoyed having a team of women around me that are really strong women. Everyone that’s worked with me, they’ve got really big personalities and their work ethic – they’re just amazing. It just feels really natural when you’re in a small space.”

We talk about her friend, Natalia Ribbe, founder of the initiative Ladies of Restaurants, and the events they’ve held together in the past. Janssen tells me about how they would often invite along other women in hospitality for dinners and panel talks and share their stories – their wins, their struggles and the experience of moving through the industry as a woman. “I think it’s really important, and really empowering to share those stories,” Janssen tells me. “I think all of the women that I know have such a strong work ethic, and sometimes it’s just quite nice to stand still and actually discuss, like, how are we feeling about this? And just see what everyone’s gone through.”

Snackbar may be her primary business, but Janssen’s initial foray into food and drink came by the way of pickles. It seems like a natural progression giving her interest in pickling came from the enormous jars that would be served at snack bars in the Netherlands to help cut through the heaviness of the fried foods they served, but there is also an enormous Indonesian influence on the food in the Netherlands due to the latter’s colonisation of the former, and it was through working at an Indonesian restaurant that Janssen’s interest was truly sparked. “I wasn’t necessarily very interested in food growing up especially, but I was interested in Indonesian food,” she tells me. “My first job was working in an Indonesian restaurant. There were lots of different dishes and everything was always accompanied by pickles.”

It sowed an interest that flourished into a part-time job, with Janssen working Monday to Friday in her 9-5 role and spending the weekends at markets selling her fares, eventually having them stocked in delis and restaurants. This passion for pickles runs central to the ethos at Snackbar, as Janssen says: “The main theme running through Snackbar’s menu is that everything has pickles in it. So it can be like an Indonesian or Dutch or a Mexican or even a more American thing. Everything has always got that element of fermented foods and pickles.”

It has been a process of deep instability and change for Janssen. Opening a hospitality business is never easy, but couple that with opening a hospitality business five months before a global pandemic forced the entire country to shut down, with restaurants taking the brunt of the hit, and it seems almost unfathomable that Snackbar has survived. Having spoken to Janssen, this seems almost entirely down to her strength and ability to adapt to ever-changing goal posts and circumstances. And, fundamentally, the lasting business model of Snackbar and its continued commitment to serving up good, delicious food – pickles or not.