Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [109]
Eating and drinking |
Drinks
Amsterdam’s favourite tipple is beer, mostly Pilsener-style lager, usually served in a relatively small measure (just under a half-pint, with a foaming head) – ask for een pils. The three leading Dutch brands – Amstel, Grolsch and Heineken – are worldwide bestsellers, but are available here in considerably more potent formats than the insipid varieties shunted out for export. Different beers come in different glasses – white beer (witbier), which is light, cloudy and served with lemon, has its own tumbler; and most of the speciality Belgian beers have their own distinctive glasses with stems of different shapes and sizes.
Wine is reasonably priced – expect to pay around €7 or so for an average bottle of French white or red in a supermarket, €17 in a restaurant. Most restaurants also stock a large selection of new world wines: mainly Australian, South African and Chilean. As for spirits, jenever, Dutch gin, is not unlike English gin but a bit weaker and a little oilier, made from molasses and flavoured with juniper berries. It’s served in a small glass and is traditionally drunk straight, often knocked back in one gulp with much hearty back-slapping. There are a number of varieties, principally oude (old), which is smooth and mellow, and jong (young), which packs more of a punch – though neither is terribly alcoholic. The older jenevers (including zeer oude, very old) are a little more expensive but stronger and less oily. Ask for a borreltje (straight jenever), a bittertje (with Angostura bitters) or, if you’ve a sweeter tooth, try a bessenjenever – blackcurrant-flavoured gin. A glass of beer with a jenever chaser is a kopstoot.
Other drinks you’ll come across include numerous Dutch liqueurs, notably advocaat (eggnog), and the sweet blue curaçao, and an assortment of lurid fruit brandies, which are best left for experimentation at the end of an evening. There’s also the Dutch-produced brandy, Vieux, which tastes as if it’s made from prunes but is in fact grape-based.
Eating and drinking |
Bars
With every justification, Amsterdam is famous for its traditional, old-style bars or brown cafés – a bruin café or bruine kroeg – cosy, intimate places so called because of the dingy colour of their walls, stained by years of tobacco smoke, and their antique-verging-on-rickety furnishings and fittings, again mostly brown. At the other extreme are the slick, pan-European designer bars, sometimes known as “grand cafés”, which tend to be as un-brown as possible and geared towards a largely young crowd, though many students are loyal to the brown cafés. In between are a host of bars that pick and mix the old and the new. Bars, of every kind, open daily at around 10am or 5pm; those that open in the morning do not close at lunchtime, and all stay open until around 1am during the week, 2am at weekends (sometimes until 3am). Another type of drinking spot – though there are very few of them left – is the tasting house (proeflokalen), originally the sampling rooms of small private distillers, now tiny, stand-up places that sell only spirits – jenever – and often close early, from around 8pm. For listings of gay barssee "Gay and lesbian Amsterdam".
Many bars – often designated eetcafés – offer a complete food menu, and most will make you a sandwich or a bowl of soup; at the very least you can snack on hard-boiled eggs from the counter. Those bars that specialize more in food than drink are listed in the "Restaurants" section.
Prices are fairly standard everywhere, and the only time you’ll pay through the nose is when there’s music, or if you’re desperate enough to step into the obvious tourist traps around Leidseplein and along the Damrak. Reckon on paying roughly €1.80–2.20 for a standard-measure small draught beer, €3–4 or so for wheat and bottled beer, and €3 for a glass of wine or a shot of jenever.
Locations are marked on the colour maps at the back of this book.
Eating and drinking