Thanks for all the feedback guys. Sorry I left you hanging with too many questions, I obviously didn't explain the situation good enough.
Here are the exact details:
- There is a restaurant chain called Name. Name is a generic word.
- They own the domain RestarauntName.nl
- I eat there a lot so I wondered one day who owns Name.nl
- Name.nl was owned by, what seemed like a studygroup or some frat house. A horrible looking site with just photos on it. It seemed like the site hadn't been updated since 2007/2008
- The previous owner, who mailed me yesterday, claims to be a non-profit organization. There's no way though that previous site was a non-profit organization site.
- Seeing as the domain looked inactive for a few years I mailed the host. It's the only thing that showed up on the Whois, the name of the host. So I mailed them asking to forward my interest in the domain to the current owner.
- That's when they mailed back and said they could transfer the domain.
Now the host in question isn't a small time teenage boy living in an attic with his 5 servers. It's a pretty solid and well-established company, so a complete amateur fuck up "looks" out of the question to me.
I'm about to get in touch with them to see if they really were the ones to fuck it up. If it's on them, I'll return the domain. If he made a mistake, it's his loss.
So in short, the restaurant owners have nothing to do with the previous domain and free dinners for life are never going to happen

