Not just for sausage
Many foodies already know Spingaren from the food truck at De Rollende Keukens, where its homemade pastrami elicited many blissful looks. The collective now has its own tasting room in Amsterdam with in-house charcuterie and smokehouse, plus around 250 covers.
Every Wednesday is sausage day at the recently opened restaurant, tasting room and charcuterie Spingaren in Amsterdam. For now, three varieties are made: rosemary, mustard and the crowd-pleasing fennel seed. But other flavours are also being experimented with.
Pastrami
Each batch of sausages takes four weeks of smoking and drying, hanging from the characteristic red-and-white sausage-making string called spingaren. The pancetta (pork belly) hangs for no less than four months.
But Spingaren first made a name for itself with its pastrami (cured beef). It remains the signature dish. Made American-style with a long preparation time of around 15 days, it produces warm, juicy pastrami with a beautiful texture.
Sausage shop Spingaren also sells homemade vegan chorizo
A meat restaurant in these vegan times? Before you, as a plant eater, think you have nothing to do here: plenty of meat-free bites can also be served alongside the homemade kimchi and other fermented vegetables on the sausage or cheese board: from sticky cauliflower to vegan chorizo and seitan satay. But do you, as a carnivore, want a serious T-bone steak? That’s possible too. Just like a whole grilled fish. And you can stock up on sausages for home.
Angel investor
The young owners behind this new restaurant gained experience at various other hospitality businesses in Belgium and the Netherlands and have completed plenty of sausage-making workshops. But it was thanks to an anonymous angel investor—Quote 500 material—that they were able to realise this gigantic establishment on an Amsterdam canal.
The juicy pastrami is Spingaren’s signature dish
One of them is a revolutionary pricing system, the ‘brainchild’ of co-owner Jorien Eliëns (29): ‘I’ve been working on this for two years. How can you prevent no-shows? How can you spread guests out better over the evening? The system that has now been developed is a positive incentive for guests: the further in advance they book and the earlier in the evening, the higher the discount.’
Discount
‘That discount can rise to 25%. It’s convenient for us, because it allows us to plan our staff. But everyone who makes a reservation gets a bonus anyway. Even on the day itself. Then you still get 2% off. So it’s completely different from those restaurants where you have to buy a ticket or make a deposit in advance. An additional benefit: because you can plan better how much food you need per evening, you also reduce food waste.’
Image: Diederik van der Laan / Dutch Photo Agency
