Netto Bar Curaçao: Inside Otrobanda's 70-Year Rum & Domino Institution

On a corner of Breedestraat in Otrobanda — the neighbourhood whose name means the other side in Papiamentu — there is a bar that has not moved, not changed its house rum, and not needed to in seventy years. Netto Bar opened in 1954. It is still there. And if you have not been, you are missing one of the most honest, most human places left in the Caribbean.

This is not a bar that markets itself. It does not need to. The regulars found it decades ago. The visitors find it by word of mouth, by a photograph shared on a phone, by following the sound of domino tiles on a wooden table through an open door. And once they find it, most of them come back.

The Legend of Netto

Ernesto ‘Netto’ Koster founded the bar in 1954 on Breedestraat, the broad main artery running through Otrobanda. He was not trying to build a legend. He was doing what men of his generation did on this island: he opened a place for people to gather, to drink cold rum, to talk, to argue, to laugh. He served Ròm Bèrdè — green rum, poured ice-cold — and the neighbourhood came to him.

For decades, Ernesto was at the bar. He knew every face. He remembered names, remembered drinks, remembered the stories people told him at the counter. As his health declined in his late eighties, he eventually stepped back from running the bar day-to-day. But even then, he could not stay away. He had himself driven to Otrobanda to visit, to greet the patrons, to check on the Ròm Bèrdè supply — to make sure the place that bore his name was still being kept right.

Ernesto passed away in 2002 — just six months before Netto Bar would have celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. He never saw the half-century mark. But the bar carried on, and when the fiftieth anniversary came, the neighbourhood celebrated it the way he would have wanted: with rum, with music, with people crowded onto the street outside.

A man who builds something honest and lasting enough that it outlives him by decades, and still carries his name, has done something rare in this world.

Otrobanda: The Neighbourhood That Made Netto Bar

You cannot understand Netto Bar without understanding Otrobanda. The name means the other side — the side of Sint Annabaai across from Punda, the colonial merchant heart of Willemstad. While Punda got the trading houses, the counting rooms, the formal façades, Otrobanda got the people: the dockworkers, the craftsmen, the musicians, the carnival bands, the rum bars.

Today both neighbourhoods sit within the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Willemstad, and rightly so. But Otrobanda has always had a different energy from its neighbour across the bridge. It is the carnival heartland of Curaçao. It is where the music comes from. It is where the island's working-class culture was forged over generations, and where it remains most alive today.

Breedestraat — Broad Street, literally — is Otrobanda's main artery. Walk it on a weekday afternoon and you feel the neighbourhood's rhythms: vendors, foot traffic, the smell of food from open doors, children on bicycles, old men in chairs. Netto Bar sits on this street as if it grew there, as if the street would not quite make sense without it. In a way, it would not.

What to Drink: Ròm Bèrdè and the Netto Colada

The house drink at Netto Bar is Ròm Bèrdè — green rum. If you have not encountered it before, the name refers to a style of young, unaged rum that has a sharp, clean character: no vanilla from oak barrels, no caramel sweetness, just the raw flavour of cane spirit at its most direct. It is served ice-cold. It is not a sipping drink in the reflective, arms-crossed sense. It is a drinking drink — social, unpretentious, meant to accompany conversation rather than replace it.

Ernesto served Ròm Bèrdè from the beginning, and his grandsons Danny and Ray Maarten still serve it today. The continuity is deliberate. This is the drink of the bar, of the street, of Otrobanda. To change it would be to change something that does not need changing.

If the Ròm Bèrdè is the soul of the bar, the Netto Colada is its personality. This signature cocktail is a tropical rum cream concoction — smooth, cold, with the richness of coconut and the warmth of rum underneath it. Where the Ròm Bèrdè asks nothing of you, the Netto Colada is a small indulgence. It is what you order when you want to sit down, settle in, and stay a while. Order one and you will understand immediately why it has its own name.

The Domino Culture at Netto Bar

In the corner — or at whatever table has been designated for it on that particular afternoon — there is a domino game in progress. There is almost always a domino game in progress.

Domino at Netto Bar is not a casual pastime. It is a social ritual with its own rules, its own hierarchy, its own language of gestures and silences and sudden loud declarations. The tiles come down hard on the table. The commentary is constant. Spectators weigh in. Alliances form and dissolve over the course of an hour. Someone orders another round.

This is, in many ways, what Netto Bar has always been: as much a social club as a drinking establishment. The rum is the reason people come in. The domino is the reason people stay. The conversation is the reason people come back tomorrow.

If you are a visitor, you are welcome to watch. If someone invites you to play, accept. You will not win — not your first time — but you will understand something about this place that no amount of reading can give you.

Danny & Ray: Keeping the Legacy Alive

Ernesto's grandsons Danny and Ray Maarten run Netto Bar today. They grew up around this place. They know its rhythms the way you know a language you learned before you learned to read — instinctively, in the body, without needing to think about it.

In 2024, Netto Bar celebrated its 70th anniversary. Danny and Ray marked it with a jubilee week of events — music, community gatherings, the bar fuller than it had been in years. It was a celebration of their grandfather's work, of the neighbourhood's loyalty, of what it means to keep something alive across three generations.

They have not chased trends. They have not rebranded or renovated into something unrecognisable. The walls are still covered in photographs, trophies, certificates, and memories spanning seven decades. The lighting is still low. The wood furniture still has the particular worn quality that comes from being sat on, leaned on, and lived in for years. The smell of the bar — rum and wood and something indefinably old — is still exactly what it was when Ernesto ran the place.

That is not laziness. That is stewardship.

What to Expect When You Visit

Netto Bar is on Breedestraat in Otrobanda, Willemstad. It is easy to find — walk the main street and you will see it, hear it, smell it. The interior is small and full of character: the walls are a museum of the bar's own history, every surface covered in something that meant something to someone who drank here over the past seventy years.

The crowd is a mix. Locals who have been coming since before you were born share space with visitors who found the bar through a recommendation or a photograph. Both are welcome. The bar has that rare quality of being entirely itself — not performing for anyone — which means everyone who walks in is meeting it on its own terms, and most people find those terms agreeable.

Order the Ròm Bèrdè. If you want something longer and richer, order the Netto Colada. Watch the domino table. Talk to whoever is next to you. Stay longer than you planned. This is what Netto Bar is for.

Hours vary — the bar follows the rhythm of the neighbourhood more than the clock — but afternoons and evenings are the core hours. Go when the street is alive around it.

Netto Bar on the Snekkie Map

Netto Bar is listed on the Snekkie app as a verified and claimed premium snekkie — one of the few bars on the island with a story and a standing that earns that designation fully. If you want to understand what a snekkie really is — not just a food stall but a place, a community anchor, a piece of the island's living culture — Netto Bar is the answer to that question made physical.

You can also read more about the island's rum culture in our Curaçao rum guide, which puts Netto Bar and Ròm Bèrdè in the broader context of what the island grows, ferments, and pours. But honestly, the best guide is the one you pour from a bottle that has been on the same shelf since 1954.

Seventy years. The same corner. The same rum. The same table. Bon bini. Welcome.