Part one

In a single night, my café got forty-three one-star reviews.

I found out at 6:40 a.m., as I pulled up the shutter, one Wednesday in February, with a north wind blowing down the Ferdinand Bolstraat as if it were a corridor. My phone wouldn’t stop buzzing in my pocket. I thought it was a glitch.

“Hair in the appeltaart. The waiter just shrugged.”

“Cockroaches behind the counter, saw them with my own eyes.”

“Food poisoning after the tosti. Two days on the toilet. RUN.”

“The owner is rude and dirty.”

The owner is me. Bram Kuipers, thirty-three, four years working seven days a week, and the best rating in the neighbourhood. The night before, Café Mus had 4.8 stars and nine hundred reviews. By morning, it had 3.1.

It wasn’t a glitch. Someone wanted my café dead.

I need to tell you about Café Mus.

Mus is Dutch for sparrow. A small brown bird, stubborn, that nests wherever you let it. It’s a neighbourhood café in De Pijp, two streets from the Albert Cuyp market. Twelve tables, a zinc counter salvaged from an old brown café in Haarlem, an Italian espresso machine I call Sofia and talk to more than I talk to my mother. We make the best appeltaart on the street, with real apples and far too much cinnamon, and a tosti with aged Gouda that makes tourists weep.

We opened it together, Femke and I. Femke Hoekstra. We had met at hotel school. She did the numbers, the marketing, the suppliers, the social media. I did the kitchen, the coffee, the customers. A company with two partners, fifty-fifty, signed at the notary’s on a rainy day, with an eleven-page shareholders’ agreement that I had only skimmed. Femke had read it for both of us. Femke read everything.

That morning, she was the first person I called.

“I’ve seen it,” she said straight away. “It’s an attack, Bram. Somebody’s got it in for us. Don’t reply to any of the reviews. I’ll deal with it.”

I let her deal with it. I had put everything I had into Café Mus: my grandmother’s inheritance, a bank loan I’m still paying off, and four years without a holiday. My girlfriend at the time had left in the second year, saying she refused to live with an espresso machine. I don’t blame her. She was right about the machine.

If Mus went under, I wouldn’t go down with it. I would go down instead of it.

The reviews kept coming all week. Ten a night, sometimes twenty. Always at night. The words changed; the stars didn’t.

The morning customers, my regulars, looked at me with embarrassment. Mevrouw de Graaf, who has been coming in to read Het Parool with her koffie verkeerd since day one, asked me under her breath whether it was true, about the cockroaches. On Saturday, for the first time in four years, there were empty tables at 11 a.m.

The following Thursday, at 2 p.m., two inspectors from the NVWA, the Dutch food safety authority, walked in unannounced. A man and a woman, in white coats, with a tablet.

“We’ve had a report,” said the woman. “Pests in the kitchen.”

I let them get on with it. I had nothing to hide. My kitchen is cleaner than my bathroom.

After twenty minutes, the man called me over. He was crouched behind the dishwasher with a torch. On the tiles, between the wall and the machine, was a rat. A big grey rat, dead, lying on its side, its legs stiff.

I had never seen a rat in my kitchen. Never.

The inspector took photos. She spent a long time looking for droppings, gnaw marks, runs. She found nothing else. She pointed that out herself, with an odd look. But a rat is a rat. An official warning, a re-inspection in a month, and a public report.

Two days later, the photo of the rat was in a neighbourhood Facebook group. Nobody knew who had posted it.

That was when the offer came.

A hospitality group, Grachtenhuis Horeca, which already owns six places in the city centre. A man in a quilted jacket, Wouter Verschoor, came in for an espresso at the counter and put his card down next to the saucer.

“I’m sorry about what’s happening to you,” he said. “It’s unfair. But that’s the internet. A reputation doesn’t come back. We would be prepared to buy your shares. Forty thousand euros. Quickly, no complications.”

Forty thousand euros. For half of a café that, three weeks earlier, had been worth more than three hundred thousand.

I told him to leave. That evening, I told Femke about it. I expected her to laugh. She didn’t.

“Bram… Think about it. Takings are down forty per cent. The NVWA report is online. If the re-inspection goes badly, we close. Forty thousand is better than nothing.”

“And you? Are you selling too?”

She looked at her glass of wine.

“They only want your shares. I’d stay on to manage the transition.”

The reviews were on several sites. Most of them on the big platforms, which never respond to anything. But a dozen had been posted on Proefkaart, a small Dutch restaurant review site run by one man in Utrecht.

His name was Joost. I wrote him a long, slightly desperate message. He called me back the following evening.

“I’m not allowed to give you my users’ data,” he said. “But those twelve reviews are fake, and I’m deleting them. They were created with twelve different accounts, within an hour, from the same IP address. All posted between 11:40 p.m. and 1:10 a.m. All on a Tuesday or a Thursday.”

He hesitated.

“I’m not giving you that address. But if I told you it starts with 84.241, would that mean anything to you?”

I hung up, went down to the café’s storeroom and switched on the light above the router. On the black box was a label the engineer had stuck on the day it was installed, with the fixed IP address of our business line. I read it three times.

84.241.

The reviews had been written from inside my own café.