{"id":94417,"date":"2026-06-18T21:19:18","date_gmt":"2026-06-18T21:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/94417\/"},"modified":"2026-06-18T21:19:18","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T21:19:18","slug":"entrepreneur-roel-bramer-spiced-up-the-nightlife-of-toronto-the-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/94417\/","title":{"rendered":"Entrepreneur Roel Bramer spiced up the nightlife of Toronto the Good"},"content":{"rendered":"

Open this photo in gallery:<\/a><\/p>\n

John Morstad\/The Globe and Mail<\/p>\n

Roel Bramer revolutionized Toronto\u2019s nightlife, first by flouting the puritanical drinking laws of 1960s Ontario, then by starting a string of successful bars and nightclubs that fostered some of the top Canadian rock groups.<\/p>\n

When he opened the Boiler Room and the Coal Bin on downtown Wellington Street in the late 1960s, the rule in Ontario was that alcohol could only be served with a meal. To get around that, Mr. Bramer served a small plate of food that met the rules but that few people would actually eat. <\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know much then but I did know this, there was a market waiting to be tapped,\u201d Mr. Bramer wrote in his autobiography, Golden Roel: Bars, Bathtubs and Broken Rules. \u201cYoung men and women just wanted a place to go where they could let their hair down, have a couple of drinks hit the dance floor. And they wanted to do it unhindered by the presence of tablecloths, finger bowls and old aunties.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bramer understood the spirit of the times and drew on these insights as he built a series of successful businesses. <\/p>\n

\u201cRoel Bramer was one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the early club scene in Toronto,\u201d Michael Bruce Marshman wrote in his book Roel Bramer\u2019s Club History in Toronto. The book lists Mr. Bramer\u2019s clubs, when they opened and the name of every band that ever played there.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bramer, who died on May 29 in Toronto at the age of 86, was never much of a rock \u2018n\u2019 roll fan, but his club the Gasworks featured some of the best Canadian rock bands. Rush, which performed there 24 times in the early 1970s, went on to national and international stardom. <\/p>\n

\u201cIn the history of Canadian rock music, there is one club that stands out above the rest, the Gasworks,\u201d said Dominic Farrell, a Toronto rock fan who came of age during the bar\u2019s heyday. \u201cPretty much every Canadian band came through the Gasworks from when it opened in 1970 until it closed in 1993.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the hit film Wayne\u2019s World, Mike Myers says: \u201cThis is the Gasworks, an excellent heavy metal bar! And always a babe fest.\u201d<\/p>\n

And during the Gasworks years, Mr. Bramer opened other clubs, including the Amsterdam Brasserie and Brewpub, the first establishment of its kind in the city, as well as a full-blown brewery, producing Amsterdam beer. <\/p>\n

Roel Bramer was born on April 7, 1940, in Den Ham, a small town in the eastern part of the Netherlands, the youngest of five children. His father was the mayor of the town, however he was fired after the German occupation of Holland not long after Roel was born. His father later joined the Dutch Resistance and Mr. Bramer later remembered his mother denying her husband was at home when the Germans came looking for him. He was hiding in a secret place in their large house.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember staring at their guns and thinking, \u2018Which one is going to shoot my father\u2019,\u201d Mr. Bramer wrote in his autobiography. The Germans didn\u2019t find him.<\/p>\n

Roel Bramer came to Canada as a teenager on a family trip from Holland in the summer of 1959. They docked at Quebec City and Roel fell in love with Quebec\u2019s wide-open spaces, and in Montreal he decided he wanted to go to McGill University.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe toured the McGill campus and I fell head over heels in love with the place,\u201d Mr. Bramer wrote in his autobiography. He started at McGill in 1960, after begging the dean of Arts and Sciences to admit him in spite of some weak marks from Holland.<\/p>\n

Always the bon vivant, he immediately joined the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, which was party central. After graduating with an economics degree, he went to work at Dupont, selling cellophane over the phone, and shared an apartment with a fraternity brother, Rick Hart.<\/p>\n

\u201cRoel was always enterprising. We were working on opening a bar on Crecent Street when Dupont transferred him to Toronto, so that ended that,\u201d said Mr. Hart, a Montreal stockbroker. <\/p>\n

Soon after Mr. Bramer arrived in Toronto in 1966, he left Dupont and the corporate world to become a nightclub impresario. His first enterprise was called the The International Swingles Club. He and his new roommate, Rick McGraw, booked venues for parties so young people could meet each other. Men paid $15, women paid $2.50 to join.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first party we had was hugely successful, but it got raided for liquor violations, which made it an even bigger success,\u201d said Mr. McGraw, who shared a house in Yorkville with Mr. Bramer in the early years. He was Mr. Bramer\u2019s closest friend for 58 years. <\/p>\n

From there, Mr. Bramer went into opening legitimate restaurants and bars. With backing from friends, he opened a tavern called the Boiler Room in a basement on Wellington Street near Bay Street. With the help of investor George Butterfield and his wife, Martha Butterfield, they decorated the place using material they retrieved from an abandoned ship in the Toronto Harbour.<\/p>\n

He then rented a place next door, which he called the Coal Bin, and blasted a hole in the wall to join the two establishments. The result was one huge space with seating for 300 people.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was packed from day one,\u201d Mr. Bramer wrote.<\/p>\n

It was 1969. The baby boom generation was coming of age and poured out of the nearby office towers to have food and fun at his restaurants. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe licensing laws of the time prohibited fraternizing between the sexes. Just the idea of single men and women talking to each other freely in a situation where alcohol was being served was seen as deeply suspect,\u201d he wrote in his book. But this changed in 1970, when Ontario\u2019s Liquor Licence Act was amended to lift these restrictions.<\/p>\n

Always a savvy businessman, Mr. Bramer said one thing he learned early was to how to spot bartenders who were stealing in what was then an all-cash business.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople steal in the bar business. I quickly learned to spot them and fired about one person a month,\u201d Mr. Bramer said.<\/p>\n

His restaurants and especially his bars, were successful but his big financial break came in 1973 when the Royal Bank of Canada needed his space to build its new office tower. They had to buy him out, and he held out for $500,000 (equivalent to $3.6-million today). <\/p>\n

\u201cAfter that, I turned my attention to not just opening bars but buying good buildings wherever I could find one,\u201d Mr. Bramer said.<\/p>\n

He opened the Gasworks on Yonge Street near Wellesley Street, then the Generator on Yonge Street near Eglinton, and then the Amsterdam and the Rotterdam brewpubs. These last two were west of University Avenue just before the area took off and filled with office towers and condo buildings. He also started a successful brewery, which he sold at a profit since he didn\u2019t want to run the business. The Amsterdam beer brand is still in existence. <\/p>\n

At one stage, Mr. Bramer became obsessed with sailing. He took part in a race on Lake Ontario every Wednesday night. He graduated to sailing across Lake Ontario to the New York State side. Then in 1977 he planned something really ambitious: sailing his 38-foot yacht with a crew of five friends in a transatlantic ocean race from Manchester, Mass., to Plymouth, England, to commemorate the 150-year existence of Plymouth\u2019s Royal Western Yacht Club.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a tough race. You sail every day, all day, all night \u2026\u201d said his friend Rick McGraw, who turned down an offer to be one of the crew. \u201cIt was extraordinarily difficult. He called me a couple of times off the coast of Newfoundland, and said, Rick, this is not what I expected.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bramer and his crew finished the race in 19.5 days, but he never sailed again.<\/p>\n

Another transatlantic incident came in the air when he was flying from Paris to Toronto. Mr. Bramer was on Air France flight 358 on Aug. 2, 2005, when the plane landed in a violent rainstorm and skidded off the runway and into a ravine.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll hell broke loose when the plane overshot the runway. At first, I thought it was game over. We were really thrown around,\u201d Mr. Bramer told CBC reporter John Northcott a few hours after the crash in front of Mr. Bramer\u2019s house in Rosedale, with a glass of champagne in his hand. He escaped safely with only cuts to his bare feet as he scrambled away from the burning plane.<\/p>\n

The handsome, blonde Mr. Bramer was by his own description, a ladies\u2019 man. When he was running his first two bars, he was secretly dating five of the 10 female servers on staff, according to his book. When he returned from one trip to Europe, it was like a scene from a situation comedy: Each of the women he was involved with discovered they were not his only girlfriend. When they threatened to quit, he \u201cgrovelled\u201d and they stayed. Soon he was dating some of them again, he wrote.<\/p>\n

In later years, he used to carry cheap watches with his name, phone number and e-mail address on the face, and hand them out to women he fancied. Certainly, a creative technique.<\/p>\n

For many years, he had boxes of chocolate made with his name and perhaps a naughty aphorism on the cover. He handed them out to managers of the best restaurants in town. \u201cArrive at a restaurant with Roel, even one that was booked two weeks in advance, and all of a sudden we have a seat,\u201d his friend Mr. McGraw said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Bramer was married only once, to Jolanda van Deenen, a Dutch woman he met on another trip home. The couple had two children but the marriage didn\u2019t last. Mr. Bramer was a single father to his two boys.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe hired a housekeeper and set up a schedule. I think this is where his Calvinistic background came in,\u201d Mr. McGraw said. \u201cRoel was home every night for dinner with his kids. He might go out again, but he was always home for dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Bramer was a successful businessman and spent a lot of time at the Toronto Lawn Tennis Club, near his home. He once said his bar and restaurant bill ran to $75,000 a year.<\/p>\n

He also supported several charities: He donated to an education fund in Guatemala, went to Zambia to help dig wells and served on a committee of the March of Dimes in Toronto, among other charity activities. <\/p>\n

Mr. Bramer leaves his sons, Lawrence and Richard Bramer, his former wife and three grandchildren.<\/p>\n

You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at obit@globeandmail.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Open this photo in gallery: John Morstad\/The Globe and Mail Roel Bramer revolutionized Toronto\u2019s nightlife, first by flouting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":94418,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[484,3009,48],"class_list":["post-94417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-noastack","tag-obituary","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/94418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/canada\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}