To begin with, the restaurants deal in the most exotic cuisine Europe. There’s a glut of cafes and restaurants near Dam Square, round the red-light district and Leidseplein: Dutch, Chinese, Italian and Indonesian. There are, for instance, Indonesian restaurants here, by the dozen, where you’ll see residents at work on a 20-dish dinner called “rijsttafel”; there are just as many Chinese-Indonesian restaurants where secretaries and office boys dart in for a normal lunch of “nasi goreng,” with a “loempia” on the side!
Try a rijsttafel from one of the Indonesian restaurants. In even the most elegant resturants, smoked eel pops up as one of the most popular opening courses, and for snacks throughout the day, you’ll discover the ubiquitous but unique sandwich shops (“broodjeswinkels”) of Amsterdam, serving ground raw meat on a soft bun! There are so many of these food surprises in Amsterdam-including a cocktail drink called “Advocaat” which you eat with a spoon!-that there’s scarcely time for a three or four-day visitor to sample them all.
For free beer, hit the Heineken Brewery at Van der Helstraat 30. The tours start at 9 a.m. and 11 a.m. Mon.-Fri., but get there 45 minutes beforehand to ensure a place. Sometimes they take a small collection at the beginning which goes to UNICEF. There are several good street markets to buy picnic supplies from, and if you want to go out for a drink, head for the Leidseplein, Rembrandts-plein or Thorbeckeplein. If you want to see ‘sin city’ and wander through the notorious red-light district of Zeedijk, go east of the Damrak to the area bordered by Warmoesstraat, Zeedijk and Damstraat.
Recommendations for restaurants are: H88 at Herengracht 88 (also a student hostel); Buddha’s Belly at Rozenstraat 145; and Egg Cream at Sint Jacobsstraat 19, open 11 a.m.-7.30 p.m. Also worth checking out is the Great Rijstaffel at Mandarin Rokin 26, as are the Prins van Oranje behind Centraal Station and the Sonja in front of the station. For dancing, etc., try Melkweg at Lijnbaansgracht 243a or Bistrotheque at Korte, Leidsewarsstraat 26. The nicest old cafes are off Jordaan. Good for a gas (and it can literally be a ‘gas’ if you’re on the wrong end of it) is the cafe Chris at Bloemstraat 42, whose toilet can be flushed only from the bar!
How to organize this information? In preparing a recent guide to Amsterdam, I ate my way through more than 100 of the city’s restaurants, and peered over the shoulders of diners in about 30 more. I’ve concluded that the only coherent plan for presenting my restaurant suggestions is to group them according to the meal of the day in which they specialize. And thus, we’ll deal first with breakfast, then with lunch, then with snacks, and then with dinner, concentrating always establishments that offer budget-priced meals.
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