Please note that since writing this blog post, Nevy has closed down
A few years ago, I went out for dinner with a client to Envy. By the end of it, we were starving. Leaving your customers feeling hungry at the end of a meal would seem to break Rule One of the business of feeding people. I mean, if there’s one thing I expect from a restaurant – no matter how good or bad it is – it’s food. Lots of it. And the option to buy more if you want it.
It probably should have come as no surprise then, that four years later, at the same chain of establishments that likes to re-arrange the letters N, V, Y and E in assorted orders, I had more or less the same experience.
This time, I was out for dinner with the project team of a London-based agency I’d been working with. There were 12 of us, so we’d been advised to choose the fixed menu. Unlike at Envy, there was no sharing concept at Nevy – it was a simple, three-course, fishy affair that should have caused no problems except for vegetarians. Those who turned up first had ordered drinks; the rest of us were left wondering whether aperitifs were an option or whether alcohol was on ration.
Meanwhile, the starter arrived, so we decided to skip straight to the wine list and order a couple of bottles of Austrian Grüner Veltliner. It struck me as odd that you wouldn’t offer a large party of guests a wine list before their food arrived (and we had to ask for it, even now), but then again a few things struck me as odd. Namely the fact that there was no bread, no butter, no olive oil… and a waitress who dropped two glasses within the first half hour of our being there, which – coupled with the fact of her being about 12 – didn’t exactly fill me with confidence in her years of professional experience.
But onto the food – or what there was of it. The starter was a mackerel fillet – fresh and oily and just cooked – served with a sweet tomato salsa, avocado puree and a few ribbons of something celeriac-like. I say all this, but frankly it could have been anything. The dish came with no introduction; we were left to figure it out on our own. This wasn’t a ‘concept’; this was just a bit slack.
Next up came a lightly seared fillet of cod (again, I think it was cod, but there was nobody to tell me) with two white asparagus spears, a small pile of steamed spinach, chopped egg, a lick of melted butter and something green and pureed that tasted like a cross between mushy peas and green asparagus. I waited a minute or so, hoping some potatoes might arrive, until my grumbling stomach got the better of me and I dug in. Which was just as well, because there wasn’t a carb to be had.
Dessert was equally Atkins diet: berries, frozen yoghurt, a few raspberry and lemon-flavoured splodges on the plate (sorry, slate) and some kind of postage stamp-sized low-fat biscuit.
Given that dinner wasn’t cheap (around €50 a head, and we didn’t get the chance to order many drinks), you’d have thought they might have been able to throw in a baguette or a bowl of chips. I wouldn’t even have minded paying for it.
Afterwards, we toyed with the idea of stopping off for patatje met from the local chippie. Instead, our guests got room service, while I went home and scoffed Carr’s water biscuits (personally imported from England) with parmesan and truffle honey. As you do when you’re the Amsterdam Foodie.
