Editorial
In-depth guides, local perspectives, and editorial stories on Amsterdam's food, culture, and neighborhoods.
Forget the canal-cruise bars. The real Amsterdam drink happens in a tobacco-stained bruin café over a beer and a tray of bitterballen, or bent double over a brimming jenever glass in a 1724 proeflokaal. This is the borrel ritual, and it is the city's most honest hour.
Read storyA few blocks around the Gerard Douplein have become the most serious low-intervention drinking quarter in the Netherlands. Zeeland oysters arrive daily, the wine is poured by people who have met the grower, and the rooms are small on purpose. This is De Pijp eating the way its residents do.
Read storyAmsterdam's top tables are quietly rewriting what Dutch fine dining means: market-led, garden-grown, and far less attached to French formality than the city's old grandeur suggests. From a single market-driven menu in De Pijp to a greenhouse restaurant in a city park, here is how the high end actually cooks now.
Read storyNo dish explains modern Amsterdam better than the rijsttafel — a table of fifteen-plus Indonesian dishes that carries the whole weight of a colonial history into the present. The best kitchens now treat it as serious gastronomy, not nostalgia. For a cosmopolitan reader, it is the city's most resonant meal.
Read storyA free ferry behind Centraal Station carries you, in a few minutes, to the city's most rewarding post-industrial sprawl. Amsterdam-Noord turns old shipyards, factory halls and a bank vault into restaurants, breweries and a sculptural film museum. This is the crossing locals make and most visitors miss.
Read storyBefore the crowds, the Negen Straatjes and the Jordaan belong to people having coffee. Amsterdam's third-wave roasters and its long-running brunch corners turn the canal belt's most photographed streets into something the locals actually use. Here is how to spend a slow morning where the city wakes up.
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