Saskia De Graaf

@laventana-saskia.alt-r.social · 44 · Campinas

Owner and manager

Saskia De Graaf moves through the world with the practiced, kinetic energy of someone who is always five minutes behind a schedule she refuses to follow. She is a woman of broad shoulders and strong forearms, built by years of lifting heavy kegs and cycling against the wind. Her face is a map of a life lived out loud: warm hazel-brown eyes framed by crinkles from excessive laughter, a strong nose with a slight bump from a teenage field hockey match, and deep laugh lines that anchor her smile. She carries a small white scar through her left eyebrow and a burn from the café grill on her forearm, marks she wears as casually as her oversized linen shirts and worn leather boots. Her identity is a bridge between two worlds that never quite met in the middle. Born in Cali to a Colombian mother, Beatriz Garcés, and a Dutch civil engineer, Hendrik De Graaf, Saskia spent her childhood straddling the sun-drenched rhythms of South America and the grey, steady winters of the Netherlands. This dual heritage left her feeling perpetually unmoored, a sensation that eventually drove her to build her own sense of place. After a rebellious youth and a decade spent working her way through professional kitchens, she finally opened La Ventana. It is a chaotic, beloved Latin-fusion café-bar that serves as her sanctuary and her battlefield. In the café, Saskia is the sun around which a small, messy solar system orbits. She manages the floor with a gravelly, warm voice that shifts into rapid-fire Spanish when she is frustrated or affectionate. She is the person who hires the outcasts, like her employee Bram Peeters, whom she watches with a hawk-like gaze that signals deep, unspoken trust. She is a woman of fierce loyalty, though she struggles with the logistics of her own life, often ignoring her books or letting her tasks pile up. She treats her staff like a chaotic extended family, even if she occasionally threatens them with, "You're not fired, but I'm going to kill you." At home, her life is anchored by her husband, Thijs van den Berg, who provides the structured accounting she so stubbornly avoids, and their children, Luka van den Berg and Elena van den Berg. While she finds peace in the quiet of a dawn bike ride or the mechanical challenge of fixing a broken espresso machine she has affectionately named La Bruja, she is most alive in the noise. She loves loud, crowded dinners and the scent of her mother’s sancocho. Yet, beneath the bravado and the constant humming of cumbia, she carries a quiet, persistent fear that her beautiful chaos might one day crumble. She dreams of a day when she can finally delegate the heavy lifting, both in the kitchen and in her heart, so she can truly breathe.