Quite rightly, some of my readers have pointed out my sorry lack of reviews of restaurants in Amsterdam Oost and thereabouts. And they have a point: if you look at my Amsterdam map, there’s such a cluster of pins over Amsterdam West that it’s hard to make out the streets of the Westerpark neighbourhood altogether. While over in the East, there’s acres of space between pins, and endless unanswered requests to check out places I’ve never been to…
So here, in a bid to redress the balance, are two restaurants east of the Amstel. What they have in common, other than the obvious, is that they are both in the middle of bloomin’ nowhere. And I say that not just as a typical Westerpark resident; even for Oost, these are a little off the beaten track.
The first is East 57, which must be in Oost because of the name – right? Well, sort of. In fact, it’s down near Amstel station, in a hotel called Casa 400 that looks like a car park – but don’t let that put you off. The hotel itself is quite interesting: there’s a wine shop inside, plus a kind of Italian deli, and of course the aforementioned restaurant that sits at sous-terre level. The food is a mixture of gastro pub and international classics: think bread, dips and olives; gourmet burgers; roast poussin and grilled fish; plus some pastas and student favourites.
But back to the food, when it finally arrived – which was about an hour-and-a-half after we’d sat down. We shared a simple platter of bread with baba ghanoush (nice, not too creamy, but a little too smooth in texture), hummus (also pleasant, although not so close to the usual Middle Eastern varieties I’ve tried), and dukkah (which was deliciously nutty) with olive oil. Washed down with a bottle of German Pinot Noir – so far so good.
I say a bottle. That’s because the bottle had disappeared (there were only two of us) before the main course even arrived, two hours and 15 minutes after we did. I kid you not. Our next glass of wine was on the house.
By this point famished and slightly drunk, I tried my main course of crispy pork belly with noodles and pak choi. It was supposed to come with kimchi, but I didn’t notice any and the noodles were so sweet they overpowered any sour that might have been in evidence otherwise. The pork belly was indeed crispy, but not just on its skin – it had been sliced up and fried, which seemed a shame. And the less said about those pink things the better.
Dinner came to €67 for two, which was not extortionate – but then again we’d had to wait three hours for the pleasure of dinner’s company. Put it this way: for a fairly average restaurant in what feels like a converted hotel car park, six kilometres from home, I won’t be biking back there in a hurry…
Next time: my review of weirdly punctuated The Gastro.bar– also in the East, but this time on Java-eiland (I told you it was the middle of nowhere!).
