Escobar changes name after criticism

Months after the launch of a petition by Latin American students and requests from TU Delft to change the name Escobar, there is now a new name for Stieltjesweg 226. According to the owner, Escobar was an abbreviation for Espresso Coffee Bar but it is now called Café Labs.

A barista, who does not want to be named, is willing to explain the new name now that the owner is at home with a broken arm. The barista thinks that there are several reasons why the café chose the name Café Labs. “At first, we mostly served coffee, but more and more people are coming to lunch. We, therefore, extended the lunch times.”

‘We didn’t want people to have unpleasant feelings because of the name Escobar’

In addition, staff called the glass room in the middle of the bar the ‘lab’, a name that is also connected to the laboratories on the campus. “It was not easy to come up with a new name, but we didn’t want people to have unpleasant feelings because of the name Escobar.” 

The name Escobar caused a commotion among Latin American students at TU Delft, even before the opening of the bar, last summer. They found it offensive that on the bar’s Facebook page, a connection was made between Colombia, coffee and the name Escobar. “If you google the words ‘Escobar’ and ‘Colombia’, you will not find coffee or beautiful things about our country, but only the drug dealer Pablo Escobar who killed many people,” said Colombian master’s student Juan Felipe Garzón Amortegui in Delta.

Latitud, the association of Latin American students, lodged a complaint at TU Delft, to ‘stop this allusion to terror, violence and drug trafficking’. The university replied that the bar is not affiliated to TU Delft and that it therefore cannot force the bar to change its name. However, the university did ask the bar to remove the words ‘TU Delft’ from its logo and to reconsider the name ‘Escobar’.

The bar changed the logo, but not the name. Then the students started a petition at the end of last year. Latitud was not available for comment. On the café’s website, the first reactions to the name change are positive. A TU Delft spokesman is ‘happy’ that ‘the owner has realised that the name in the international community was sensitive’. “All’s well, that ends well.”