When the weather in Amsterdam is as beautiful as it has been throughout April and May, there is no stopping the usually sun deprived Dutch from crowding the canals with boats and covering the parks with picnic blankets.
A very convenient way to join in the fun is to pick up a ready-made picnic basket at Casa e Cucina, an organic lunchroom with friendly service and free wifi. Casa e Cucina is located on Koninginneweg, less than 5 minutes walking distance from Vondelpark. The picnic baskets are € 14,95 if you order in advance and contain a tuna salad wrap, pasta salad, a piece of carrot cake, water and orange juice.
And I’m sure you’ll be able to organize the missing beer or prosecco from one of the convenience stores on your way!
Back in March I landed an incredibly fragrant and fresh white truffle on one of my frequent trips to Italian traiteur Feduzzi. This weekend I got lucky again. Feduzzi was offering black summer truffles from a fresh delivery from Italy. And like last time, dinner plans were quickly adjusted to Tagliatelle with a sherry and Parmesan sauce and raw shaved truffles.
The black truffles were not as intense as the white ones and pricey at € 40,= for 10 grams. We still enjoyed them a lot!
summer truffle, tagliatelle, parmesan and sherryraw shaved summer truffle on tagliatelle
Amsterdam is promoting itself as the “City of 1001 Flavors” in 2009. As part of the year long program, two large food events are taking place in June.
Festival Sustainable Amsterdam, Saturday 6 June 2009, Westergasfabriek
This festival promotes sustainability initiatives in Amsterdam – solar cars, electric scooters, eco neighborhoods and more. Several food events will be part of the festival.
Slowfood Netherlands is organizing the Holland Food Festival, a taste market where you can buy from local producers. Then there is a cooking competition on stage, pitting chefs from top Amsterdam restaurants De Kersentuin, Ron Blaauw, Krasnapolsky, and Oud Zuid against each other. At the fitness snackbar you will have to generate the energy needed to mix your smoothie on a rowing machine.
It’s all happening on the Westergasfabriek, a former gas factory consisting of several beautiful brick buildings. The weekend of the rolling kitchens will take place at the same time and place. Dozens of mobile food stalls unite for a giant open air restaurant.
Taste of Amsterdam, 25 – 28 June in the Amstelpark
The Amstelpark will see a much more high-end culinary event as London based “Brand Events” organizes Taste of Amsterdam during four days from June 25 to 28. Taste of Amsterdam is part of a world-wide series of food festivals originating in London and now taking place in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Sydney, Melbourne, Dublin, Cork, Dubai and Amsterdam.
For EUR 12,50 you buy tickets up front for either lunch or dinner on one of the four days. For an additional EUR 4 to 9 each you can then sample up to 3 starter-size signature dishes from 15 of Amsterdam’s top restaurants including Sophia, Vis aan de Schelde, Ron Blaauw, elusive hot spot Momo, Jamie Oliver run Fifteen, Restaurant As and Le Garage.
There also are wine tastings, live cooking demonstrations, and a fine food market.
Trendy but sometimes expensive concept supermarket Marqt is luring customers with discounts on selected items.
The discounts run until the end of May, with a specific items discounted on the different days of the week. Monday is fish-day with a 30% discount on fish, Tuesday meat-day, followed by cheese-day, veggie-day, ready-meal-day and finally bread-day on Saturday when bread is off 30%.
Marqt is fun to go to with its market-style set-up and focus on fresh, local produce. But it also suffers from limited selection on several product categories and high prices on others.
I like the fish and the bread. So if you want to take advantage of the discounts, check in on Monday or Saturday.
30% discount on fish every Monday at Marqt Amsterdam30% discount on bread every Saturday at Marqt Amsterdam
Yesterday it was time for a trip to Feduzzi to pick up some of their own import parma ham, Parmesan, fresh pasta and some other delights. Upon arrival my mood got even better as I was greeted by signs announcing the availability of fresh white truffles!
tagliatelle with Parmesan sauce and shaved wite truffle
I immediately asked to see them and was not disappointed – a large bowl of beautiful white truffles carefully kept on dry rice and under saran wrap. Ever proud of their merchandise the Feduzzi staff was quick to lift the wrap and let me smell the truffles. The smell was intense and I knew that the truffles were fresh and top quality. In fact, they had arrived that same morning!
Dinner plans were quickly adapted to fresh tagliatelle with a Parmesan and crème fraîche sauce and shaved truffles. Delicious!
You may have noticed dutchgrub’s silence. We recently spent 10 days in Cape Town – a fantastic city with great sights, warm weather, unbelievably intense colors and a wealth of food options! While I’ll leave the sights for you to discover elsewhere, here is some food advice.
In this first part I’ll write about restaurants in and around Cape Town. Later I’ll add an article about the vineyards around Franschhoek, Paarl and Stellenbosch.
There are many, many restaurants in and around Cape Town and we relied on a combination of research on Chowhound, the TimeOut guide and suggestions by friends who used to live in Cape Town. Making the right choice is not easy – the selection is large and constantly changing with restaurants opening and closing at a dramatic clip.
We were slightly disappointed initially. Two restaurants that were highly recommended – Riboville on Chowhound and Beluga by friends – did not live up to their potential. Both are large, offer an endless but also aimless menu including seafood, sushi, steak, pasta and other dishes, and are very marketing driven with happy hours, 99 rand kilos of prawns and glossy menus and all.
We went to Beluga on our first night. It has great location in an old factory between the Waterfront and de Waterkant. It has a large bar with inventive cocktails and a hip crowd. There was some function and service was atrociously slow – it took more than an hour for us to order. The starters were good – very tender salt-fried calamari and prawns with a fresh lemon, coriander and ginger butter. We had some maki rolls for mains and were disappointed – all had too much rice, little flavor and generally were rather dry. One was even made with fried tuna!
Riboville was similarly disappointing. It’s located on Long Street in the city center in a former bank vault. The building is impressive and the dining room very large. Like Beluga, the menu is a mix different styles – seafood, fusion and also sushi. And service was overly present and unprofessional.
We did enjoy Fork and Shoga, two small and much more food-oriented restaurants in the center of Cape Town. Fork is a tapas restaurant on Long Street. It’s located on the first floor and has a small terrace with a great view over Long Street. It’s quite stylish with bare brick walls and fluffy kitchen towels as napkins. The service at Fork was by far the best of the trip – knowledgeable, attentive and friendly. And we loved the tapas – highly inventive and beautifully presented concoctions such as crispy asparagus and Parmesan rolls or seared salmon with Asian greens and wasabi mayonnaise.
Shoga also has a rugged brick wall look and is located in a somewhat desolate area between Long Street and Bo-Kaap. It’s actually part of a two restaurant setup – with fine dining Ginja on the ground floor. Shoga has a fusion menu from which you order several small dishes to share. We loved their prawn skewers served standing up in a long shot glass filled with a sweet chili and lime dressing. The salt crusted calamari and the springbok cubes were also great.
We had great lunches in the city and in the coastal towns around the bay. Willoughby’s, located smack in the middle of the enormous Waterfront shopping mall has simple but fresh seafood and sushi and draws a mix of shoppers and business types. Quay 4 a little further down by the water is a great place to hang out and watch the crowd while having prawns and white wine. The Royale Eatery on Long Street has a fun 60s decoration and generous burgers. And the Origin Cafe in de Waterkant has good coffee but few snacks.
inside the olympia cafe kalk bay
The best food of the trip was the Olympia Cafe in Kalk Bay – another Chowhound suggestion. Kalk Bay is a small coastal town full of antique shops and art galleries. The Olympia Cafe is located on a corner by the fisherman’s harbor. The cafe started in the 90s as a simple fish and chips joint. Today it has somewhat of a hippie feel and sucks you in with its friendly atmosphere and great smell of fresh food!
yellow tail dish at olympia cafe
There is frantic cooking going on in the open kitchen and there is an incredible smell of fresh cookies and pastry from the associated bakery. We had grilled yellow-tail that literally fell off the bone and pumpkin risotto. The menu was written on a blackboard and everything looked super fresh and well prepared – mussels, line fish, seafood linguine and much more.
Mariner’s Wharf in Hout Bay is another great lunch location in a small fisherman’s town. There is a restaurant upstairs and a fish and chips place downstairs. You pick up your own food in the snack bar style kitchen and sit on one of the wooden benches. It looks like a tourist trap but the food is incredible! Super tender calamari and crispy fries.
As an area for food, drink and fun we liked De Waterkant a lot. It’s a small neighborhood between the Waterfront and Bo-Kaap where a lot of creative types live as well as a large gay community. It’s safe so you can walk around which is not the case everywhere. Andiamo has decent Italian food and a good terrace. The Nose wine bar is just across and we enjoyed a few good glasses on a warm night when the staff did not mind us staying after hours. And Cafe Manhattan is where everybody hangs out for a few beers – loud music, a mostly gay crowd, and cool beers. There are a few more interesting places in the Cape Quarter.
I hope to get around to writing about the fabulous food at Reuben’s, an extensive wine tasting at Fairview and more food and wine around Franschhoek, Paarl and Stellenbosch.
This 
It’s all happening on the Westergasfabriek, a former gas factory consisting of several beautiful brick buildings. The 
For EUR 12,50 you buy tickets up front for either lunch or dinner on one of the four days. For an additional EUR 4 to 9 each you can then sample up to 3 starter-size signature dishes from 15 of Amsterdam’s top restaurants including Sophia, Vis aan de Schelde, Ron Blaauw, 
