Amsterdam Foodie

Ahhh February, my old friend! We meet again.

You know how I feel about February: it’s all bills and work and tax returns and Valentine’s drivel. And now Holland has suddenly formed part of the Arctic circle and – as if things could get any worse – this February my passport is off in Paris somewhere being red-taped, which means that I can’t escape even if I manage to salvage the last remaining scrap of cash the government hasn’t swindled off me… Bah humbug.

My body seems to have given up all hope. As if on cue, yesterday my tonsils turned into the craters of the moon’s surface. It wasn’t pretty. I needed vitamin C. And probably a hot toddy.

I started simple: lime juice, honey and ginger in a mug with hot water. Fine, but there’s only so much of it you can drink before your body goes into toxin-deprivation meltdown.

So I started digging out some recipes that involve citrus fruits and other vitamin-rich ingredients. Here’s what I found…

Tuna, blood orange, fennel, carrot and avocado salad: ok, so it’s not exactly winter fare, but it’s certainly jam-packed with the good stuff. Use the leftover orange juice and the fennel tops in the dressing for added healthy loveliness. I stole the idea for this salad from restaurant Marius – thanks chef!

Chicken roasted with orange zest and juice, potatoes, fennel and olives: much more appropriate for a cold evening, and just as delicious. It’s a Jamie recipe, so you can find it online. It’s supposed to be made with guinea fowl, by the way, but traipsing across town looking for exotic poultry seemed to defeat the object of keeping warm and getting better, so I settled for a small chicken.

That accomplished, I’m now on the hunt for the ultimate kill-or-cure hot toddy recipe. Any ideas?

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Restaurant: Sent (European)    
Saenredamstraat 39-41, (De Pijp) 676 2495 website Book now

Actually I guess it’s not. I’m technically writing this on my laptop, just like I normally do. But there are two significant differences in the process I took to get here…

Exactly the week ago, I entered the Apple age. It had taken me long enough, but for a variety of fairly nonsensical reasons I finally decided to take the iPlunge. So on Saturday night, I was sitting in Sent (a modern European restaurant in de Pijp with a good reputation) with no camera and no notebook. Not even a pen and a scrap of paper. I felt a little naked.

Instead, I took both notes and photos using my iPhone, and contemplated exactly how anti-social I must look tapping away on my “smart” phone while my dining buddies sat talking to each other wondering when they’d lost their analogue friend to technology. My first note was about the amuse: it was pumpkin soup in a glass with a beetroot and mustard foam. I couldn’t really taste the beetroot, but the soup was perfectly nice.

The starter – when it came, at least an hour and 15 minutes after our arrival – was better still: a surf ‘n turf medley of chorizo, squid, tiger prawn, and a shrimp bitterbal, served with a well seasoned white bean purée and a little nest of lightly pickled spitskool (that funny-looking white cabbage in the shape of a cone). Delicious, but then again we were so hungry a Maccie D’s would have looked appealing by that point.

We all went for meaty mains, which was just as well since the waiter (who was considerably more personable than the waitress, with something of the Mad Professor about him) felt compelled to bring us a free bottle of red wine. By this point it was gone 10 pm, and we were all slightly drunk from Merlot and lack of nourishment, but from what I can recall the food was worth the wait. I ate perfectly rare venison with salsify root and crisp, parsnip mousseline, Brussels sprouts, and a poached pear stuffed with chestnut purée. Sweet and savoury and wintry.

My dining buddies, when they weren’t listening to me raving on about my new iPhone, ate fillet of beef (also perfectly cooked) with some kind of ravioli that involved ricotta and truffle. I didn’t try the rest but I heard appreciative noises over the bleeps of Whatsapp messages plopping into my digital life.

All three of us made a bee-line for the ‘Grand Dessert’ of five not-so-mini-puddings (our eyes were a little bigger than our bellies, but we didn’t know if we’d have to wait till breakfast time). The selection comprised a warm pineapple and coconut number, passion fruit cheesecake, lemongrass crème brûlée (there was clearly a bit of a tropical theme going on), chocolate torte and blueberry sorbet. I didn’t finish my cheesecake or sorbet (the portions were disproportionately large compared to earlier courses) but my table mate wolfed them both down after his own.

Dinner came to under €50 each, although the bill would have been higher if we’d had to pay for both bottles of wine ourselves. Mind you, I should probably factor in the €15 it cost us to get home because the trams had stopped running by the time we left the restaurant. The food was definitely worth more than the three stars I’m awarding Sent, but the speed and quality of the service was worth considerably less. Once again, I’m reminded that I really need to revise my rating system…

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered the limitations of restaurant reviewing via iPhone. Every time I finish a sentence and want to check my notes for the next course, the damned thing has locked itself and I have to keep swiping and password-ing to wake it up. Now, you never get that with a piece of paper, do you?

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I get quite a few emails requesting me to try out someone’s new restaurant/cookery school/dining concept/food product/[insert random not-always-food-related service here]. For reasons of time and money management, not to mention the potential for obesity, I often have to say no. But something about HelloFresh’s request clearly appealed, because a week later two young men appeared on my doorstep bearing an enormous white paper bag full of food. I can think of worse things to appear on the doorstep…

HelloFresh’s concept is about fresh food that busy people can make from scratch in half an hour: a mission I heartily applaud. In theory, you get everything you need in the bag to make either three meals or five meals (in both cases for two, four or six people – I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do if you’re single). The package I received (three meals for two people) would usually cost €39, and the rest range up to a maximum of €129 for five meals for six people. The bag includes meat, fish, vegetables and various other dry ingredients that you need to get started, plus three recipe cards (currently in Dutch only).

Although HelloFresh already operates in Germany, England, France and Australia, it’s only just launched in Amsterdam so there were a few teething problems the week my bag arrived: namely one of the ingredients was missing, and another that was present didn’t appear in any of the recipes. But the guys realised their mistake and emailed me the next day.

On the first evening of my HelloFresh diet, I made tagliatelle with salmon, mascarpone, lemon, lime and capers. It was rather lacking in greenery, but tasted good enough and certainly ticked the quick and easy box.

The second day I cheated slightly: I was supposed to be stir-frying pak choi and mushrooms with chilli, ginger, garlic and soy sauce, but I can’t stand mushrooms, so I substituted them for the leftover salmon and squeezed half a lime over at the end (which also wasn’t in the recipe).

My third HelloFresh meal was the Dutchest of them all: rookworst (smoked sausage) with stamppot: potatoes mashed with andijvie, bacon cubes, mustard, butter and milk. For various reasons that make no sense to me either, I’d never actually made a classic andijvie-spekjes stamppot, but it was surprisingly good. And very, very Dutch.

From an international point of view, I think the recipes could have been a little more creative, while still fulfilling the speed and simplicity criteria. I also think they could have been more clearly written: with quantities in the ingredients list and better structured steps in the method. To be fair, I gave the guys this feedback, and two days later they responded to say they’d taken my suggestions into the second drafts of their recipe cards. (Note to self: there must be money to be made in recipe consultancy somewhere…)

The food itself was unfailingly fresh and high quality, and the quantities were generous – too generous for three meals, if I’m honest. It’s day five and I’m still only halfway through my andijvie! So, will I be putting in a regular order from HelloFresh? Probably not, but in my case mainly because I enjoy the process of food shopping, deciding what to cook, and spending time doing it. I’m not really their target audience. But I know a lot of people who are, and there’s no harm in giving it a try…

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Restaurant: Tabac (Asian)    
Brouwersgracht 101, (Jordaan) 622 4413 website

Restaurant: Pica Pica (Tapas)    
Camperstraat 48, (Oost/Watergraafsmeer) 465 2010 website Book now

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.

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There’s nothing original about the title of this post. In fact, I nicked it from another article on the same subject. But it was a term I found very useful when Googling restaurants in Copenhagen. The fact that the city is now home to the world’s number-one restaurant means that the rest of its food scene seems to have pulled up its gastronomic socks. Which is just as well, since clearly I had no hope of getting a reservation at Noma…

Instead, I discovered Paustian. Part furniture design store, part restaurant, it sits on the water in an out-of-town location, which feels even more out of town when it’s zero degrees and pitch dark in the middle of January. The food is modern Danish: traditional, local ingredients, cooked and presented in ways that live up to the stark Scandinavian beauty of the furniture pieces next door.

We tried the local dried ham to start, which was served simply with a celeriac remoulade and caramelised onion. We asked to share it, and they brought out two separate, small plates – a thoughtful touch, and one we appreciated given how eye-watering expensive Copenhagen is.

For mains, we chose a melt-in-the-mouth veal shank with its bone marrow, plus a venison casserole involving venison sausages as well as rare doe fillet and steamed parsnips. Both were comforting yet elegant, and perfectly executed.

On our second night, we plumped for something completely different. Right in the heart of downtown Vesterbro, LêLê is a throbbing, trendy Vietnamese establishment with live music kicking in later on the Saturday night we visited. We ordered fresh spring rolls with pork to start, as well as a sea bass tartar with hits of chilli, lime and cucumber. Our mains were equally light and fresh: seared beef salad with gem lettuce, mint and holy basil, plus sweet pork patties with glass noodles and more lettuce leaves in which to wrap them.

Prepare yourself: Copenhagen is pricey. Seriously. But everything we ate and drank was top-notch foodie stuff, and I didn’t regret a single Krone.

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