There’s quite a buzz about the Giro in Amsterdam these days with ads, banners and posters in pink, the color of the leading cyclists jersey, everywhere. I thought people would probably enjoy some good Italian food on the day of the Giro and decided to compile a list of the best Italian restaurants in Amsterdam.

Italian Restaurants

For traditional Italian food in Italian atmosphere I would recommend Restaurant Koevoet, the best traditional Italian food in Amsterdam, or Café de Curtis, a simple but good Italian.

Restaurant Koevoet (no web site)
Lindenstraat 17
1015 KV Amsterdam
Tel: +31 (0)20 6240846

Café de Curtis (no web site)
Tweede Anjeliersdwarsstraat 6-HS
1015 NT Amsterdam
Tel: +31 (0)20 4200767

Italian Pizzeria

For pizza, I would suggest Renato’s Trattoria, the most Italian of dutchgrub’s best pizza in Amsterdam.

Renato’s Trattoria – www.renatotrattoria.nl
Karel du Jardinstraat 32
1072 SK Amsterdam
Tel: +31 (0)20 673 23 00

Italian Take-Away

And to pick up some Italian food to go and enjoy at home behind the TV or alongside the race track, you should head to Da Portare Via, dutchgrub’s favorite pizza to go, or pay a visit to Pino who has great deals on pasta and pizza with a big Italian smile.

Da Portare Via – www.daportarevia.nl
Leliegracht 34 (take away only)
1015 DG Amsterdam
Frans Halsstraat 63
1072 BM Amsterdam
No phone.

Vino di Pino – www.vinodipino.nl
Haarlemmermeerstraat 164
1058 KK Amsterdam
Tel: +31 (0)20 3377637

The latest initiative is a unique six course dinner by three German guest chefs combining for a total of eight Michelin stars! The extravaganza will set you back € 249,= plus € 160,= for wine pairings and promises to be a once in a lifetime experience including free limo service. Reservations can be made online.

There will be an exhibition as well as many workshops. The exhibition features a mix of Italian wine stores, delis, equipment vendors, book and magazine publishers, cooking schools and even food tourism operators. There will also be wine and food tastings as well as small cooking lessons, although several of the workshop already seem fully booked.

Loods 6 is a former dock that has been transformed into shopping and office building with a professional event center. It has an industrial feel to it and should be a great venue for the event.

So it’s not all too surprising, but nonetheless sad, that Dutch kroket chain Danku had to close doors of its NYC location. Danku had been promoting Dutch krokets and other fried food for the last few years. They ran a cool campaign with a very Dutch cow in Central Park against a NYC skyline. And were offering Dutch staples such as the famous “Broodje Kroket” as part of their quick lunch menu.

Now both US review site Yelp as well Dutch restaurant news source Misset Horeca have reported that Danku is closed due to financial difficulties. There also are reports that Danku will re-open in another location, so some hope remains to relive those Amsterdam moments back in NYC.

The first source came up in the comments of the previous post: Restaurant Yamazato in the Okura hotel has an extensive sake list (pdf), including an organic junmai ginjo and several daiginjo. The Okura is also planning to offer sake tasting workshops as part of its Taste of Okura cooking classes, although no dates have been announced yet.

And I got even more excited when I discovered that my favorite wine shop, Ton Overmars, had started carrying a selection of sakes! I went there last weekend to pick up some bottles of Tempus Two and immediately spotted the new sake section above the port and cognac. Ton now has 15 kinds of sake available, complete with classification and some descriptions.

What was even better was that Ton spotted me checking out the sake and was nice enough to not only help me make a selection but let me taste five kinds right on the spot! Apparently I had just missed one of his memorable tasting evenings in the neighborhood church. And luckily there were some bottles of sake left open and ready to be tried.

I settled for a bottle of Sake Nabeshima Chõko,which is an unpasteurized junmai with a complex aroma and a very smooth structure from aging. Ton also has the Kizan I got some time ago at the Pure Markt, as well as some specialties like a reddish colored sake, a bottle with active yeasts and a 31 year vintage sake!

If you are into sake, you should definitely check out Ton Overmars on Hoofddorpplein in Amsterdam!

400 years ago Henry Hudson discovered the island of Manhattan and founded New York, then known as New Amsterdam. The local Indians received him well with oysters.

To celebrate the anniversary the Slowfood organizations of the Netherlands and New York are throwing a big oyster party. The event will take place on September 13 in restaurant Kompaszaal on Loods (dock) 6 at KNSM-Laan 311.

From 4pm to 6pm there will by oyster tasting and presentations by two oyster experts. The party will follow with oysters, movies and live jazz music.

Oyster Party

Last week the Holland Food Festival and the Weekend of the Rolling Kitchens were jointly held on the Westergasfabriek. And on June 25, 26, 27 and 28 the Taste Festival will visit Amsterdam for the first time.

Another event that will be a lot of fun for foodies is the Amsterdam Roots Festival Sunday 21 June from noon to 9:30 pm in Oosterpark. The Roots Festival promotes cultural diversity and portrays Amsterdam’s global community. Seven stages will fill the air with music from local and international artists. And a world market with over 100 booths will tickle your multi-ethnic taste buds with exotic food, drink and more.

The article goes into Marius’ history. Chef and owner Kees Elfring used to cook at Berkeley institution Chez Panisse, which provided both training and inspiration for the name of the restaurant. Marius is the title of a movie that’s part of a trilogy in which the main character is called Panisse. The article also goes into details of the daily market menu that the author thoroughly enjoyed! With pictures.

It’s nice to see that Marius is getting well-deserved praise. And since it’s such a small and genuine place, I am not worried that too much coverage would ruin the magic.

Qype is the largest user-generated local review site in Europe with a strong focus on restaurants and night-life. It’s like Yelp for Europe. The company was founded in Hamburg, Germany, and not surprisingly is strongest there with more than 110.000 restaurants reviewed. Qype is now expanding in other European countries and has built up a good following in the UK with 40.000 restaurants currently in their database.

Amsterdam restaurants reviewd on Qype

Qype is still small in the Netherlands but is becoming an interesting alternative to current leaders iens and dinnersite. iens has been around for many years, starting out as a printed restaurant guide with content contributed by anyone willing to fill out a test form. iens is, however, steadily declining. The reviews tend to be short and generic and the search and browse functionality makes it difficult to filter out the right restaurants. Sponsored content is taking a more and more prominent place.  dinnersite organizes the restaurantweek and generally aligns more closely with restaurants rather than guests. It never managed to gain sufficient scale, and while being useful for finding general information, lacks in the reviews.

I have always loved Yelp and Chowhound, mostly for the great content by foodies for foodies and in Yelp’s case also for the nice user interface. You might need to take some time reading through the reviews, but I think it’s great how many valuable reviews foodies post there. Reading through them gives me a great impression of restaurants when researching a trip abroad. I hope that Qype – or Yelp, which is now expanding in Europe – can do the same for Amsterdam!

table mountain cape town

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.