Eating & Drinking Our Way Through Amsterdam

My husband and I recently took a trip to Amsterdam and Munich and on top of all of the wonderful museums, castles, and palaces we spoiled ourselves with delicious food and beer.  My cousin lives in Amsterdam so we were lucky enough to stay with him and he was able to show us where to find all of this delicious food and drink.

After a long day of traveling, my cousin knew we would be thirsty so our first stop was the rooftop bar Canvas.  It was a perfect sunny day for a rooftop bar and I enjoyed a La Chouffe, a Belgian blonde beer.

Sticking with the beer, some of my other favorite stops were Caffe Smalle, Cafe Hoppe, and 't Arendsnest.  I really enjoyed 't Arendsnest as it had a huge variety of beers, all of which were from Dutch breweries.  Some of the Dutch beers that hit the spot were De Leckere, Jopen, and Snap.  

Cafe Smalle

Cafe Hoppe

A stop you have to make if you ever go to Amsterdam is Wynand Fockink, not just because saying the name of this place pretty much allows you to curse, but because its a distillery that serves traditional local liqueurs and jenevers (Dutch gin).  We managed to stop here everyday so we could try different flavors of liqueur and jenever, below we are demonstrating how to sip the top off your drink before taking it from the bar.

To finish up the drinking summary of our trip, we of course did the obligatory stop at the Heineken brewery.  This is not actually where they brew beers anymore as they have moved to larger facilities outside of the city.  I'm not a huge fan of Heineken, but it does taste better in Holland and especially at the Heineken brewery.  They did a really good job with the tour, what they call the Heineken Experience, and best of all you get 3 beers with the tour price.

Now onto the food, which was really good and we ate a lot of it.   We ate the Amsterdam must haves of frites, bitterballen and cheese, and learned why they are must haves.  The key to the frites was the frites sauce, bitterballen are meat croquettes, and we all know cheese is glorious.

The restaurant highlights were Bazar, The Pancake Bakery, and Sama Sebo.  Bazar was a good brunch stop, with a wide variety of Middle Eastern style food at a good price.  It is a really cool atmosphere as it's in an old church and decorated pretty extensively.  I'd recommend checking it out if you are going to the museums or the Heineken Experience as it's fairly close to those stops.  

The Pancake Bakery features Dutch pancakes, which pretty much seemed like Crepes to me.  Between the 3 of us we had 2 savory pancakes; ham, mushroom and cheese and a tomato and cheese, I love savory crepes and both of these exceeded my standards.  The perfect way to finish it off was with a Nutella and banana pancake.  The Pancake Bakery is very close to the Anne Frank Museum so go here for a meal before or after you make that stop.

If you want to treat yourself to a nice dinner, I'd recommend Sama Sebo and I'd recommend going there hungry.  Also, it gets pretty busy so try to make a reservation.  We stopped in and made a reservation late in the afternoon and then hung out at Vondelpark until it was dinner time.  It's feature is the Indonesian rijsttafel, which was €30 per person.  It's a huge spread of food all of which was pretty tasty.

So that's the food and drink summary of Amsterdam, from there we moved on and continued our gluttonous behavior in Munich.  I'll save that for another post and leave you to digest Amsterdam for now.