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?

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.

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.

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…

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…

Still, a friend of mine sent me the picture below, which cheered me up no end.

And there’s always Indian food and a hair-of-the-dog beer to cure even the stubbornest of hangovers. Which is why I ended up at Ganesha with the boys last night. We had prawn balti (my personal favourite), chicken tikka masala (heavy on cream) and lamb dopiaza (a little salty). The rice and naans were good, however, and the Cobra slipped down remarkably easily. Unlike on Friday night, however, I remembered to order some water on the side.

A week or so prior, I found myself at Chengdu: a Sichuan hotpot restaurant whose steaming cauldrons of spicy broth also struck me as a great hangover cure (not, for once, that I had one at the time). You can order them in hot, mild, or half and half: the first is full of dried chillies, pepercorns and a host of other fragrant spices, although the mild is rather more sippable by itself. The concept requires you to take various meat, seafood, veges and seaweed from a buffet bar and throw it into the broth for as long as it takes you to fish it out again with your chopsticks. Noodles, rice and sauces are available on the side. All very social.

I may be over 30, but I’m not ready to give up my twenty-something lifestyle just yet. Thank god for hangover cures.

Londen has the kind of décor you’d expect in an international hotel lobby. It’s not exactly cosy and fuzzy. And it’s not exactly packed full of people either. But the menu is full of British classics – like chicken biryani (yes, this is a British classic these days), fish and chips, and beef wellington (or should I say, Wellington, after my horseradish post) – and the wine list inviting, so we forgave the ambience…

To start, we shared fried goat’s cheese with beetroot (fine) and a sweet potato soufflé (not fine). The latter was not a soufflé, and it was heavily spiked with lemon. Now, I generally add a squeeze of lemon juice to everything I cook, but one thing I learnt after an experiment with a roasted squash pasta dish is that sweet root vegetables and lemon don’t mix. We didn’t finish that bit.

I chose the fish and chips for the main course, despite never having heard of the fish of the day. The waitress said it was called ‘harde’ in Dutch (I think) but I’d never come across either the word or the fish. Turns out there’s a good reason for that: it’s not particularly nice. Slightly grey beneath the skin, it has a faint earthy flavour that was not (in this case) masked by any crispy batter. It was undoubtedly fresh, and perfectly cooked, and it may be the most sustainable alternative to cod on the market. But none of this makes up for the fact that it was not, fundamentally, a fish designed to be eaten. On the plus side, the chips were crispy on the outside, fluffy on the inside; the lemon mayo tangy and light; and the side salad well dressed.

My dinner buddy ordered the chickpea curry, which looked – well – like a pile of chickpeas. There was not much in the way of sauce or flavour going on.

Despite all of this, we still had a jolly old British time – not least because the waiter and waitress looking after us were fabulous. Attentive but not over-present, friendly but not obsequious – they could teach the rest of Amsterdam a lot about how to serve customers. It’s a shame they can’t teach the chefs how to cook better. I’d give our servers five stars, but the food only two. And this, of course, leaves me with a dilemma…

And so, Amsterdam Foodie Technical Director (who I know likes new little techy projects to play with on the website), if you’re reading this: how about coming up with a new way to show price, food quality AND service in our rating system?

We arrived straight from work at 6.30, but there were already a few traditional Dutch types tucking into their dinner at 6 o’clock sharp. The lighting and décor was a little stark and ongezellig, and the acoustics and proximity of the tables were such that we felt compelled not to gossip, but we were – after all – there for the food.

To start, we had something that looked like bitterballen but clearly weren’t. Actually, they were quite a lot nicer than bitterballen. In texture, they were more like arancini, but then with grated carrot and kernels of corn in addition to the rice, and lots of gooey cheese. They came with a dipping sauce that was basically tzatziki. It was simple, but good.

Things went downhill from there. The main courses worried me just from reading them on the menu. My dish featured (in no particular order, because the presentation – or lack thereof – was such that I have no idea which the key feature was supposed to be): a luke warm, rather limp slice of something resembling an omelette containing apples and chestnuts; a pile of green beans with chopped tomatoes and boiled egg; half a kohlrabi stuffed with something nutty; and two brown-coloured sauces, one that tasted faintly of mushrooms, the other of meat (somehow). It was a mess – both to look at and to taste.

My colleague’s dish was slightly better presented, but fared no better in any other respect: two flabby onion rings; a piece of fried bread that called itself a blini; an earthy grated beetroot salad with the added ‘bonus’ of a large chunk of ungrated beetroot skin stuck to its side that someone had forgotten to remove; assorted mushrooms, parsnips and carrots; and a tian of some bulgar-like substance that featured hazelnuts. She was not impressed.

We looked at the dessert menu, and then decided to get the bill (€30 each) and try our luck down the road instead. I can’t very well review a place just on its desserts, but if you’re ever passing the Chocolate Bar in the Pijp and fancy a sweet fix, order the Killer Chocolate dessert for just €6.50. It rocks.

Next time, we might skip de Waaghals and head straight to the Chocolate Bar instead.

When I moved to the ‘buurt, it was Albert Heijn, Spar, a few local Turkish shops and the ubiquitous kebab-cum-pizza snackbars. Now, my hood is home to Restaurant Freud, Holy Ravioli takeaway, Pinsa’s pizza cookery school, Bagels & Beans, and a few more recent arrivals. For anyone new to the area (or even for those further afield – we’re quite the ‘destination’ these days, I tell you!) here’s a round up of the latest and (not necessarily) greatest…

Le Sud

A Mediterranean/Middle Eastern deli with at least half a dozen different types of hummus and eight varieties of marinated olives, Le Sud is, without doubt, my favourite thing about the Spaarndammerbuurt. It’s so good they decided to open another branch down the road at Haarlemmerdijk 118. Le Sud also happens to be home to the Best Sandwich in Amsterdam: Turkish bread, warm falafel, mildly spicy hummus and all the salady trimmings. Apparently, it’s entirely vegetarian, but this carnivore didn’t even notice – so it must be good.

Freud Lunchcafé

From the people who brought you Restaurant Freud (unsurprisingly), the lunch café on the opposite side of the street does a decent line in sandwiches, toasties and basic brunch dishes. Like its big sister, the lunch room is staffed by psychiatric patients, who generally give you more pleasant (if somewhat erratic) service than many regular Amsterdam cafés.

Yayang

A new (at the time of writing) Asian takeaway serving meals, salads and soups from India to Indonesia and everywhere in between. Yayang claims organic credentials, which it may well have, but that doesn’t mean the chefs don’t need to know how to cook the green ingredients. The massaman I had was oddly sour, lacked depth and fragrance, and featured the bitterest excuse for a peanut I’ve ever come across. Because the kitchen aims to cater for vegetarians, the meat comes as an optional extra on ordering, which means that it’s tough and tasteless, while the sauce is lacking flavour from the meat as well. Oh, and it’s expensive: nearly €15 for the beef massaman with rice; for that money, there are plenty of better sit-down Thai restaurants in the area.

I woke up more or less fantasising about chocolate cake. I then spent half the afternoon cycling round Amsterdam looking for the chocolate cake I had in my head. My search led me to a new shop called (fittingly) Chocolate Company on the Haarlemmerdijk. And half an hour later, there I was happily sitting on my sofa with a pot of tea, a cake fork and this tower of chocolate-y indulgence on the coffee table in front of me. I do love giving in to myself.

About twelve hours and far too many alcohol units after that, I rocked up at the Vlaamse Frites snackbar on Lange Leidsedwarsstraat, where I ate patat oorlog (chips with mayo and satay sauce) and sang Mary Poppins songs at the top of my lungs with my two best-est guy friends. And I realised my ex was entirely right: being an adult is fabulous.

But between all of this indulgence, I ate dinner. (You might wonder how I managed to fit it all in, but metabolism is a wonderful thing.) We went to Köşebaşı, which is a new(ish) Turkish restaurant on the Amstel, where Altmann used to be. First impressions were not all that good: it looked like a classy enough place, but no one offered to take our coats, the napkins were made of paper, and the wine list took at least ten minutes to arrive. When it did, and when I ordered from it, the waiter offered the bottle to my (male) friend to taste. This is my absolute number one most-hated occurrence in restaurants. And all my friends know this, so they are particularly amused when it happens.

Anyway. Onto the food bit. The starter ‘menu’ was a little out of the ordinary: our waiter appeared with a large tray carrying about 20 dishes – most cold, and a few hot. We chose five that we wanted to eat, and he went away and heated up those that needed to be served warm. It sounds a little odd, but it worked. As well as some fairly generic hummus and a tomato/red pepper/chilli/herb salad-type thing, we ordered the house speciality, which was minced raw meat mixed with chilli and spices that you drizzle in lemon juice and eat wrapped in a fresh lettuce leaf. Moreish. Also good was the semi-dried aubergine stuffed with rice and spices, although the mini-Turkish pizzas were a little dry.

For main, I ordered a skewer made up of lamb kofte (meatballs) and roasted aubergine (I am crazy about aubergine). It was served with flat breads, a kind of bulgar pilaf, and three small, largely onion-based salads. It all tasted pretty good (with the exception of the overly tangy onion concoctions), but the kebab was desperate for sauce. Or maybe I was desperate for sauce. Either way.

We didn’t manage dessert (which is probably no bad thing given the rest of what I ate on Saturday) and the bill came to a little under €50 each including a bottle of Turkish red wine. I’m still on the fence about how I feel about the restaurant – try it and let me know what you think.

And in the meantime, I can thoroughly recommend – just for one day – giving into every temptation that comes your way. There’s got to be some perks to growing up.