Christiaan Smit
Snug 15-table fine dining with an open kitchen
The UNESCO canal ring of merchant houses, hidden museums and slow waterside walking.
The Grachtengordel is the seventeenth-century ring of canals, Herengracht, Keizersgracht, Prinsengracht, that gives Amsterdam its shape and its UNESCO listing. Behind the gabled merchant houses sit hidden museums, narrow galleries and a few restaurants that have kept their tables for decades. The pleasure here is slow: walking a single canal at dusk, watching how the light works the water and the brickwork. It can feel like a postcard, but the canals are still genuinely lived along, with houseboats and bicycles tucked against the quays.
4 Lokale
Snug 15-table fine dining with an open kitchen
Two-Michelin-star dining in an 18th-century canal-house bakery
One-Michelin-star European cooking above Dam Square
Modern tasting-menu cooking on the Singel canal
5 Lokale
Cocktail history in a 17th-century canal house
Curio-filled cocktail den in a centuries-old alley
Tess Posthumus's bar in the 1662 Odeon monument
Amsterdam's original hidden speakeasy
1724 jenever distillery and tasting house
1 Lokal
1 Lokal
1 Lokal