Amsterdam Foodie

The beginning of 2012 has gone by in a bit of a blur, to be honest. So much has happened, I’m not quite sure how the rest of this year is going to live up to its flying start. In an effort not to jinx it, I think I’ll hold back on telling you more until it does.

In the meantime, it’s been back to reality with a bump. And since I’m not a big fan of sitting at home alone thinking too much, I decided to eat my way through it. So the night before last, I met a friend for a catch-up and dinner at Tabac. Now, Tabac is a little confusing because its interior tells you it’s an old-fashioned eetcafé, while its menu tells you it’s Asian. Still, keeps you on your toes.

The food is nothing spectacular, but then again neither are the prices, so I’d go back for the ambience and Noordermarkt/Prinsengracht/Brouwersgracht location alone. I had some kind of stir-fried beef number (fine) with noodles (not very fine) and prawn crackers. Andrea had chicken tikka masala that was fairly generic, a tad too salty and – weirdly – also came with prawn crackers.

The following evening, I headed southeast to tapas restaurant Pica Pica. The décor has something of the village hall about it, and they could do with turning up the heating. The service was all a bit mañana, but in a nice way – the waitress handled our request not to have to think about our menu very well, and brought us a well-balanced selection of seven tapas between three of us.

There were hot, oily chorizo sausages with something that tasted like pickled apple balls. I liked them in the way you like sour gobstoppers when you’re a kid, but it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. We also had piquillo peppers stuffed with salt-cod purée, spicy meatballs, garlicky prawns, chickpeas with a slightly-too-salty bacalao broth, excellent patatas bravas, and a veggie number involving aubergine, lettuce and something vinegary. Given that decent tapas are hard to find in Amsterdam, I think they did a fairly good job for just over €25 a head, including a bottle of Rioja.

Maybe reality isn’t so bad when it involves food, friends, and my favourite city.