Amsterdam Foodie

I have taken on far too much in March. It’s my busiest time at work, I have a HUGE new assignment for Time Out Amsterdam, I’m taking a Dutch exam tomorrow and (most importantly) I have to figure out what to cook for my March seasonal blog entry.

But amongst all this, I found time to score a table at Altmann for Amsterdam Restaurant Week. It’s a tough job, but someone’s gotta do it.

I took the boy from Whitton whose first remark, on entering the restaurant, was: ‘Oh dear, you didn’t tell me I shouldn’t be wearing jeans and trainers’. I might have done, had he brought any other apparel with him. But not to worry – this is Amsterdam, where practicality comes before style. (In a good way.)

It being Restaurant Week, Altmann was offering a three-course menu for €25, with a choice of two starters and two mains. We ordered a bottle of silky South African Pinotage while the boy decided what to eat and I decided the opposite.

First up, I had a trio of salmon: smoked, moussed, and wrapped in seaweed and breadcrumbed. It was light and fresh where it was moussey, lightly smoky where it was smoked, and rawly warm where the heat from the fryer had penetrated the salmon’s clothing. It came with a sauce that tasted rather like lemon Fairy Liquid, and I could’ve done with more bread for my mousse. But other than that, it was excellent.

For main, I ate halibut with what purported to be aubergine ravioli (but tasted more like spinach and ricotta) and a tomato salsa. The fish’s freshness was marred by its being just slightly overcooked, but the rest was delicious – despite the unidentifiable contents of the ravioli.

The boy ordered the beef, which came with a potato gratin topped with serrano ham (that left the potatoes too salty for my taste) and a red wine jus. The beef was perfectly rare, and the jus meaty and sweet. But the dish would’ve benefited from some green vegetables to cut through its richness.

Dessert also came in a trio: this time of chocolate. Another mousse, white chocolate ice cream, and a dark chocolate, fig and nut torte. The balance was exquisite: the bitterness of the torte with (what tasted like) brandy-soaked figs was offset by the cool sweetness of the ice cream and the freshness of a Mr Whippy-shaped swirl of yoghurt. And the mousse? Well, that was just chocolate for chocolate’s sake!

Moreover, the service was timely and attentive – possibly too attentive. The boy reported unnecessary physical contact and gratuitous flirtation from the (hot) female waitress. But then again, I can’t claim that I’ve never flirted with anyone in a professional context, so who am I to judge? And besides, he was probably just trying to make me jealous…