Amsterdam Foodie

This weekend saw the four-day ‘Taste of…’ festival coming to Amsterdam for the first time. I showed up on the last day, dodging the potentially tropical rainstorm, to find out what it was all about…

The premise (according to the chefs on Saturday Kitchen yesterday) is to give people the opportunity to taste small portions of things they might not otherwise be brave enough to order in a restaurant, and to showcase the signature dishes of some of the city’s finest chefs. Now, I don’t generally have a problem with ordering chefs’ signature dishes in restaurants, but I suppose I just about get the point. As well as various food stalls selling their wares, participating restaurants included Eau de Vie, Lute, Ron Blaauw, Fifteen, Aan de Poel and Le Garage amongst around 15 in total. Confusingly, while the other food stalls took regular money, the restaurants themselves required tokens (priced at €1.25 each) to purchase small taster plates costing between four and six tokens.

I tried Ron Blaauw’s lamb cutlet with navarin of lamb; while the cutlet was well cooked, the navarin was a little salty and the sauce lacked bite. I also made the mistake of trying the Iberico ribs from Momo (I’ve reviewed Momo before and wasn’t hugely impressed then either); the sauce was sickly sweet and sticky, and overpowered any Iberican flavour that the fatty, overdone ribs might once have had. By far the best was the lobster brik I ate courtesy of Sophia – a hot little parcel of sea-filled goodness. So hot, in fact, that it melted the pathetic plastic cutlery with which we were expected to eat everything.

The tents showing cookery demonstrations seemed to be permanently full, and from the sidelines all I saw were annoying presenters talking over the chefs. More fun were the freebies being given away at the food market stalls – an olive and truffle tapenade was a particular delight.

The ambience was slick, the clientele monied. Which was a good thing, since after eating nearly 20 euros’ worth of taster dishes, I left the Amstelpark feeling rather hungry and slightly poorer.