Amsterdam Foodie

Restaurant: De Italiaan  
We have Scary French Lady to thank for most elements of this blog post. You may know of Scary French Lady because she leaves comments occasionally, or you might have met her at Hidden Kitchen. She’s effortlessly elegant and a marvellous baker (her almond madeleines are utterly Proustian) and she’s French, of course. Which means [...]

Restaurant: Holy Ravioli  
Restaurant: Lazagne  
Restaurant: Pinsa's  
If you live in Amsterdam, it won’t have escaped your notice that we had local elections last week. Miraculously, I’m allowed to vote in these elections (I’m not allowed to vote in the national elections for some perverse reason, even though I pay Dutch taxes, own a Dutch flat and have a Dutch company registered [...]

Restaurant: Humphrey's  
A few weeks ago, I got in touch with the brains behind Amsterdam Spoke: an online magazine for Amsterdam’s would-be writers to profile their work – and to provide insider info on the city to boot. For the last few months, Spoke’s writing community has been congregating for meet-up drinks, dinners and creative events, so [...]

Restaurant: Fa Pekelhaaring  
Apparently ‘pekelharing’ is the term used to describe the saltiest preserved herring Dutch money can buy. Given that extremely salty preserved herrings don’t sound all that appetising, Firma (or Fa) Pekelhaaring is not an obvious name to give to an Italian restaurant. I was hoping the website might enlighten me with some history (say – [...]

Restaurant: Greetje  
When the waiter at Greetje brought us our menus, he asked whether we’d prefer English or Dutch. Since we didn’t mind, he brought both. I opened the English first, and was bemused to read that we could eat ‘kitchen maid’s sorrow soup’ to start, and either a ‘Rolling Bitch’ or something that involved a ‘pigeon’s [...]

Restaurant: Fyra  
I’ve said this so many times I sound like a broken record: it does not take much to make me spend money in a restaurant. Offer me an aperitif, I’ll take it. Ask me if I want dessert, there’s a good chance I’ll say yes. I’ve got profit written all over my forehead. And I [...]

Restaurant: Cafe Sarphaat  
I generally seem to judge an eetcafé by its satay (or saté, or however you spell it), largely because I think it’s what people want if they’ve decided to go somewhere cosy and dark and warm. Café Sarphaat’s was really rather good: decently spicy-sweet sauce, chicken that was char-grilled but not dry, crunchy kroepoek and [...]

Restaurant: Harkema  
Ok, so I cracked. I’d just delivered my annual annual report (all 16,000 words of it), I’d had a stressful week at work, I was meeting a drinking buddy in the pub… At some point around 8 o’clock on Friday, my resolve melted – much like the snow outside. It started with one Affligem; it [...]

Restaurant: Cinema Paradiso  
I have made a very rash decision. For various reasons, I stupidly set myself the challenge of not drinking any alcohol for the month of January. It’s not a detox, nor a diet, so don’t panic peeps. Nor is it in any way some kind of New Year’s resolution that I expect to extend past [...]

Restaurant: Pain Quotidien  
We’ve never seen so much snow in Amsterdam. Well, someone probably has, but not those of us who’ve lived here for approximately the last half decade. And we’re extraordinarily badly adapted to it: children push toboggans along in the absence of any hills to slide down (why do they even sell toboggans in the Netherlands?); [...]