Amsterdam Foodie

When I was 17 my first nephew was born, which means that ever since I’ve been an adult there have always been kids around at Christmas. It also means that I’ve always gone back to my parents’ place in England, or to my brother’s house in Belgium. For the most part, Christmas is about children and I’ve been happy enough to travel to wherever the majority of my family happens to be. But I’ve always secretly harboured a desire to host Christmas in my own home: a truly adult Christmas with a classy tree, grown-up friends, and the quantities of alcohol you can only get away with when you know you’re not going to have to babysit afterwards.

This year, completely independently and for various reasons, several of my friends and I all decided to stay in Amsterdam for Christmas. And so I cooked. Here’s what we had…

Chicken liver pâté brûlée…

…with onion confit and a salad made of postelien, red chicory and walnuts.

And ultra-English roast turkey…

…with roast potatoes, parsnips, pigs in blankets, devils on horseback…

…and, of course, brussels sprouts.

I must admit, I loved every minute of it.

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Restaurant: Mashua ()    
Prinsengracht 703, (Leidseplein) 420 0559 website Book now

I’ve been pretty lucky insofar as keeping friends around goes. As an international type in Amsterdam, you more or less expect that some friends will go back to their native country, or move on to another work assignment elsewhere. But in the six years I’ve lived here, my core group of friends has stuck around. Better still, they’re all buying houses and shacking up with Dutchmen, which means the chances of their staying local is even greater. But in 2011, I’ve had to say goodbye to a few good friends. Two are Americans who are bound for the States, and we miss them.

Last weekend, however, we were lucky enough to have both of them back in town. (They can’t keep away, clearly, which only goes to prove they should probably move back here.) We decided to check out a Peruvian restaurant for dinner, before heading on to drink, dance and make merry on the Leidseplein. Mashua isn’t all that new any more, but I’d still never visited despite cycling past on numerous occasions.

It took us a while to get drinks, but since half the Yanks were three sheets to the wind by the time we met, it didn’t much matter. Besides, the wines (a Grüner Veltliner and a Carmenère) when they came were good.

To start, I had thinly sliced raw tuna drowned in a sauce that was heavy on lemon juice and sesame. There was nothing wrong with the sauce; there was just way too much of it. I could barely find the tuna at the bottom of the lake.

My main was one of those disappointed-expectations dishes. It had sounded so great on the menu: ‘twice-cooked knuckle of lamb, glazed with honey, dried yellow peppers, wine, cilantro, hint of espresso and lavender, with red bean “tacu-tacu”, purée of pear’. What appeared was brown. Very brown. The lamb shank was coated in (I presume) what it said in the description, but I missed all brightness of flavour. And lavender? Espresso? You’d have to be a MasterChef judge to identify those two. I have no idea what ‘tacu-tacu’ is, but from what arrived on the plate it seemed like a small mound of rice topped with dried-out bean purée. The pear was nowhere to be tasted. It wasn’t that it was even that bad – it just wasn’t what it said on the tin.

For dessert, I had the oddest mousse I’ve ever eaten. It claimed to be made from a tropical fruit known as ‘lucuma’, but it tasted exactly like green tea. I don’t like green tea. I guess that wasn’t Mashua’s fault, but it didn’t exactly help my impression.

Dinner came to €60, which I wouldn’t have minded paying were it not for the fact that I was considerably disappointed with every course. Sometimes people ask me whether my being critical of the food in a restaurant ruins my enjoyment of going out for dinner with friends. But in my head they’re entirely separate. And when I’m out with friends as good as these, I’ll always have a great evening – no matter what the food’s like.

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I was reading a blog or a cook book recently whose author said that they thought pomegranates looked ‘festive’. I was surprised, because I thought they looked sort of summery, but then I discovered they’re in season in winter. Easily persuaded, my metaphor-inclined mind likened their red jewels to Christmas-tree lights, stained glass windows, and holly berries. So it’s official: pomegranates are festive.

As are cocktails, so my first foray into purposing my pomegranates took the form of a ‘cosmo-pometan’. It was loosely (very loosely) based on an idea I got from Jamie Oliver for a gin/pomegranate shooter combo. But I didn’t fancy doing shots on a Monday night, so I lengthened the drink with some cranberry juice and lime (my buzz phrase in America: ‘more lime please!’) and served it in a martini glass.

The other half of my pomegranate I used with aubergine two ways (mainly because I loved the first way so much, I couldn’t resist a second aubergine-pomegranate coupling). In the picture below, I roasted aubergine halves with thyme and served them with a buttermilk sauce, ruby pomegranate gems, and a dusting of sumac.

In the second version, I scraped out the innards of blackened aubergine and mixed them with Greek yoghurt, pomegranate seeds, mint and lemon juice, and served it as a sauce with roasted baby pumpkin wedges and cumin-seared lamb.

For the first time this year, I’m celebrating Christmas in my own apartment in Amsterdam with friends rather than family (more about that nearer the time). I somehow suspect that pomegranates might be featuring on my festive menu…

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Restaurant: A La Ferme (French)    
Govert Flinckstraat 251, (De Pijp) 679 8240 website Book now

I remember once asking the boyfriend of a mate of mine if the two of them would like to come to a Michelin-starred restaurant with me and another mutual friend. He politely turned me down, explaining that if he was going to spend that kind of money, he’d rather it was just the two of them. I felt quite offended at the time, and also perplexed: whenever I intend to spend a significant amount of money at a restaurant, I would generally rather do it with a friend who I know will appreciate the food than with a date who may or may not turn out to have a moral issue with foie gras.

But it seems I’m in the minority. Friday night at semi-pricey A La Ferme was awash with couples. It could have been Valentine’s Day. I was there with Scary French Lady for ‘Wild’ Restaurant Week, and we felt as conspicuous as – well, as we usually do, I suppose. You get used to it.

The whole wild thing meant we didn’t need to consult a menu; we got what we were given. And jolly nice it was too. The amuse was a mini-tureen of lentil soup, with a duck pithivier. Small and expertly formed. The starter was a type of game pâté with some braised mushrooms and a small salad. It was good in every way, but lacked the sweet-spicy contrast of a nice chutney or onion marmelade.

We had a sort of in-between course, which I suppose would have been the fish course but wasn’t because it was pigeon. It was sensibly cooked and served with tangy sauerkraut and a small quenelle of mashed potato.

We were offered a choice of two mains, so we ordered both (obviously). In my excitement at not knowing which to start with, I forgot to take a photo of either. One was duck with its own jus; the other venison with a cranberry and cream sauce. Both came with celeriac mash and wintry cabbage. On balance, I probably preferred the venison, but more on the grounds that I’m not so crazy about the texture of wild duck than on the flavour.

Dessert was a fairly simple chocolate trio comprising brownie-like cake, mousse, and (my personal favourite) a nut-based ice cream. I was also quite impressed with the house wine: a Jumilla that was affordable and eminently drinkable.

Despite our Restaurant Week discount, we still ended up spending almost €70 each, but it felt justified for the food we ate and the service we enjoyed. And Scary French Lady and I both left the restaurant confident in the assumption that we appreciated what we’d spent our money on more than most of the couples there…

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Restaurant: Soho Sushi (Asian)    
Lange Leidsedwarsstraat 33, (Leidseplein) 428 5858 website

Several very strange things happened last night. The first was in Soho Sushi. Let me set the scene:

I’d arrived a minute or two later than my friend, and after ten minutes at our table no one had offered either of us a drink (nothing strange there, thinks the Amsterdammer). Eventually, we asked for a wine list. There wasn’t one: just red, white or rosé. Not feeling particularly confident about committing to a bottle on so little information, we asked to taste the red. Our server poured us two small glasses (so far, so good). I wasn’t convinced, so my friend decided to order a glass of the red by herself, while I opted for a cocktail. The waitress brought the glass of red wine, and proceeded to empty the contents of my friend’s tasting glass into the full glass. A little odd, admittedly, but waste-not-want-not ‘n all that. But then, she tipped the contents of my tasting glass in as well. I was speechless. Literally. I couldn’t order for another five minutes.

In the meantime, my cosmopolitan arrived. Thank god, I thought, needing a drink by this point. Only it wasn’t a drink. It was pink high-fructose corn syrup. Whatever alcohol might have been hiding in there didn’t even touch the sides.

It didn’t bode well, but we soldiered on. To start, we shared some edamame beans (by far the best thing on the menu), chicken yakitori, and salt and pepper shrimp. The yakitori marinade was generic, and the sauce more watery than sticky. The shrimp bore no evidence of any pepper, and the saltiness came mainly from the accompanying brown gloop. It had also been battered and deep-fried, but not quite for long enough, so it ate like flabby, soggy tempura.

The sushi we had next was clumsily executed, although the fish on the nigiri did at least taste fresh. One of the maki rolls contained something overly fishy and brown and salty. Sort of like fish paste but even less pleasant for being so unexpected. Also disturbingly salty was the soy sauce. You wouldn’t think you could get soy sauce wrong, but somehow they did. We paid up and got the hell out of there.

And then another very strange thing happened. I went to a sports bar. In Amsterdam. And we’re not talking about any old sports bar here. We’re talking about the Satellite – you’ve seen it, you’ve just ignored it. Trust me. It’s on the corner of the Leidseplein opposite Burger King. It has about 50 screens inside, all playing different games (I was there to watch LSU Tigers vs. Georgia Bulldogs play American football – don’t ask; it’s a long story). Beer costs about a fiver, tap water is off limits, and they serve an excessively long, overtly international menu, seemingly all night. The toilets have signs everywhere saying ‘No Drugs Allowed’ and ‘Video cameras in operation’. Everything – everything – about this place screams “don’t go inside!!!” And yet I did. And I had fun. And stranger still, at about one in the morning, after a dozen portions of baby-back ribs had wafted past my nose on their way from the kitchen to a tourist with the munchies, I ordered one myself. We all know I like pork, but from a sports bar? Whatever happened to standards? Ok, it might have had something to do with the number of over-priced Coronas I’d drunk at the time coupled with my post-Soho dissatisfaction with my sushi dinner, but I confess: they actually tasted pretty good.

A very, very strange evening indeed…

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