Our Man in the Provinces on Trendless Hospitality
He ate out several times a week, always searching for the tastiest herring, most enjoyable wine, juiciest hamburger or best meat thermometer. But six months ago, journalist Marcel Langedijk traded Amsterdam for the Provinces. Is it bearable there for a lover of better food and drink? This time: the advantage of trendless hospitality.
There are many advantages to living in the provinces. Such as the lack of trends. Not that we’re backward here, you know. We also know that the overall is hip, not as workwear, but as an outfit. We also have people with expensive headphones, funny hats, difficult hair and we’re overrun with hipster mums with electric cargo bikes – well, okay, I’ve seen two of them in our city, but still.
We also know Anna Nooshin, Kalvijn and Lizzo here. We also know that The Opposites recently gave a sick, dope, ill, insanely cool performance, even though they’ve been split up for years. We know about the Milkshake Festival, have our own food truck festival and Lil’ Kleine performed here recently. So there.
Brown fruit
But it’s nice that those trends don’t seep through everywhere. Take hospitality, for example. At my favourite café here, I can order ten bitterballen or ten mini frikandellen, for example. Ten at a time, instead of seven (why seven?), as in the Big Cities. And for five euros instead of eight. And if I want, I can also have five bitterballen and five mini frikandellen. They don’t make a fuss about it. Need extra sauce? They bring it. For free. And that brown fruit comes on a plate, a white, ugly plate. With a raised rim, so they don’t roll off. Logical, you think, but in Amsterdam I was recently given seven – WHY SEVEN? – on a piece of slate. Which the sweating teenage waiter understandably found terribly difficult to handle.
Food from pickle jars
Another terrible thing: putting things in glass jars. Because it looks so nice. Jars are made of glass, you know, and you can see through glass so nicely. So you take a worn-out pickle jar – true story – and put your hand-turned granola (cruesli) in it, then a layer of blueberries personally roughed up by the gardener, then more granola, a layer of Madame Jeanette (for extra bite, you get it, very trendy) and then yoghurt. From a carton from Aldi, because that yoghurt recently won an organic-dynamic price, thereby showing that the place had remained so ordinary.
I have no problem with putting things in jars, but it has to serve a purpose. For example, I make a pokebowl at least once a week. Not because it was trendy seventeen years ago, but simply because it’s convenient. Sushi is more hassle, takes more time and effort, and has to be eaten with chopsticks. A pokebowl is a kind of sushi, but in a huge quantity, in bite-sized chunks and, because nobody’s watching, we just eat it with a spoon. That’s convenient.
Monstershakes
Then you also have ‘monstershakes’. Or ‘freakshakes’. No doubt developed by the same asshole who came up with those seven bitterballen. If I understand correctly, the idea behind them is that there is no idea behind them. Except that as many calories as possible have to go into an enormous glass. What goes in doesn’t matter, as long as it’s sweet, fatty, gloopy, creamy and lethal before too long.
The same applies here: I don’t see the point either. And I know trends don’t have to be useful at all, that trends are fun and cheerful and that they’re all well-intentioned, but I’d sooner buy an electric cargo bike than have to eat one of those shakes – so to speak, because I hate electric cargo bikes.
Read also:
