On Thursday, it was announced that the El Café bar, which came under fire in 2021 for sexual assault allegations committed by their staff, will be closed down. The LO Group who purchased the establishment have said that they will relaunch it in the coming months under a new guise.
The El Café bar in the student district of Cimetière d'Ixelles became infamous towards the tail end of 2021, as it emerged that one of their bartenders had been accused of raping a student, in June 2019, for which he was been sentenced.
This led to other victims coming forward with their testimonies from the bar and resulted in the #BalanceTonBar movement being launched to collect other allegations of assault in Brussels bars.
As a result, El Café came under further scrutiny as it was alleged that management had transferred one of their servers accused of these heinous crimes to another bar they owned. The controversial move left the bar's future in limbo until this Thursday, when it was confirmed that the establishment would be closing its doors after a new acquisition by the LO Group.
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On 1 January, the LO Group announced that they would be relaunching it in the coming months as a brand new establishment. "We decided to close it down immediately as we wanted to make a clean break," Thomas Trothen, one of the LO Group's partners told La Dernière Heure.
The new management will now take their time to figure out how best to redevelop the bar, which "we consider to be a victory" and offer the possibility "to turn over a new leaf."
