Hotspots

At Café Beurre in Amsterdam, you eat wonderfully in a super-fine atmosphere: a top spot!

A café you would love to visit every day, where you can also eat wonderfully. Every neighborhood deserves a café like this, and Amsterdam’s Staatsliedenbuurt is the luckiest of them all. That’s where ‘restobar’ Café Beurre has opened. An accessible neighborhood gem, with locals as very welcome guests. What a top spot.

Foto van culinair journalist Sharon van Lokhorst

door Sharon van Lokhorst

The toilets hadn’t even been painted yet when reviewer Mara Grimm from Het Parool stopped by. She was overwhelmed by the quality (‘the cooking here is done with a rare and excellent sense of taste’) and rewarded the sympathetic restaurant with an 8.5. And then: ‘Chaos!’, says owner Kim Jongbloed, who comes to every table this evening. Not necessarily to socialize—it’s Wednesday, and he helps with the washing-up then. Soon he’s back in the kitchen.

With help from his aunt

Kim more or less grew up in the hospitality industry; his aunt Karin Gaasterland was one of the founders of the acclaimed Balthazar’s Keuken restaurant and he helped out whenever he could. By now, Karin cooks at various locations around the world with her rising one-woman cooking pop-up Cuisine Carine. Her style is intuitive and bold, and her signature is on the menu at Café Beurre, as she also creates the menus here.

The tables are close together and it takes some maneuvering (what do we do with our coats and bags? Oops, sorry, that nearly knocks over a bottle of wine at the neighboring table). The tables are set with a lit candle (a real one, not some pathetic little tea light), a bottle of water, and French bistro tableware. There are also two sheets of A4 paper: a simple, clear menu—the menu changes every six to eight weeks—and a sheet with the wines.

Pear juice from Normandy

We start with a lovely glass of bubbles from Domaine Pignier. This Crémant de Jura is made exactly like Champagne and has a pleasant, fine mousse, fresh acidity, and ripe fruit. The alcohol-free bubbly Le Pétiot is also delicious, made from pure pear juice from Normandy.

Radishes with butter

The menu is entirely vegetarian, by the way, without making a big fuss about it. Kim: ‘We don’t call ourselves a vegetarian restaurant.’ But you won’t miss meat here, because the menu is dominated by dishes with rich flavors of butter, olive oil, and garlic. The dishes on the menu cost around 10 euros each, while the aperitif dishes cost half that.

Of course, we order the classic radishes with butter. The rich, creamy, heavenly butter is homemade from dairy produced by organic farm De Beekhoeve. A wonderful combination with the fresh radishes we dip into it. And naturally, we also use the butter on the flatbread served with the butternut squash baba ganoush and goat’s cheese cream. This is a heavenly dip: creamy, generous, flavorful, and topped with roasted grapes.

A 9

The potato tortilla with Parmesan cheese and confit black olives is heavenly too. For 8.50, you get a generous piece that’s perfect for sharing. ‘A 9,’ we say almost in unison.

The braised beet with ajo blanco and pistachio gets just as high a score. Ajo blanco is a cold soup from Andalusia that you eat when it’s scorching hot outside, made with stale bread, garlic, almonds, water, olive oil, and vinegar. It’s typically the kind of simple dish that excels in flavor, and the same goes for this version with beetroot. Delicious!

Gnocchi with girolles

The gnocchi with Brussels sprouts, beurre noisette, and girolles (meaty, peppery mushrooms) is a rich and powerful dish that warms everyone’s heart—except that of the die-hard Brussels sprout hater. As a counterbalance, we order the salad with carrot, walnut, and dried apricot. It’s the only dish of the evening that doesn’t have us dancing with joy (too bland, too greasy). And okay, one minor downside: the tables are so small and so close together that we don’t know where to put everything.

Dessert with gin mousse

The lemon and gin mousse dessert with salted almonds is sold out just when we want to order it, so we’ll definitely be back for that. The same goes for the leek terrine with salt-cured egg yolk; like the beet, it’s one of the classics on the menu that isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

As soon as we get up, the next guests are already eager to take our places.

Nominated for ‘Best New Restobar’

The service at Café Beurre is informal, the atmosphere is top-notch, and (almost all) the dishes are genuinely very good. It’s no coincidence, then, that Café Beurre was recently nominated for an Entree Award (the coveted hospitality prize from trade magazine Entree Magazine). Specifically, in the ‘Best New Restobar’ category. These are casual hospitality venues with a genuine ‘bar vibe’, where the dishes go beyond traditional bar bites.

So go soon! By the way, you can’t make reservations at Café Beurre. On busy days, that sometimes means waiting for a table with a drink at the bar or on the sheltered terrace (where, even on a weekday under the heaters, it’s wonderfully cozy). But in this fantastic atmosphere, that really doesn’t matter at all.