Weesper: neighborhood café plus

Weesper has been located on Amsterdam’s Weesperzijde for some time now. FavorFlav’s Sophie and Emma sat down for an extensive dinner.

When you walk in, the bar immediately catches your eye; it is prominently positioned in the middle of the establishment. It is a beautiful open space with various corners and alcoves, which makes it very cozy.

Drinks and bites

The drinks-and-bites menu ranges from standard Dutch bar snacks to pâté de campagne, Limburg-style meatballs and cubes of aged cheese. On the large terrace, you can sit in the sun until the end of the day. Still want to sit outside after the sun has gone down? By the entrance there is a tower with heated cushions that you can take outside with you.

Herbaceous

For starters, we get the smoked carpaccio with truffle mayonnaise, capers and puffed wild rice, and steak tartare with an egg yolk served separately. Both are well seasoned. The Jerusalem artichoke soup that follows contains plenty of sage and tarragon; the hazelnuts on top are so delicious that we actually wish there had been more. The Caesar salad is also good, with hot-smoked salmon from Frank’s Smoke House.

But the star is the ras el hanout ice cream

For main courses, you can choose from two types of fish, short ribs, pork chop, various steaks and sides to accompany them. Simple and clear—that’s what we like. It’s only the word ladysteak—which unfortunately appears on the menus of several restaurants—that makes our skin crawl. Women can certainly handle 200 grams of meat.

Perfectly cooked

The skrei fillet and bavette are perfectly cooked and full of flavor. The short ribs are exactly how we like them too: incredibly tender, but still in one piece on the bone. But what impresses us most is the pork chop. It has been brined and is consequently so tender and flavorful that we don’t want to stop eating. As a side, you can order fries from Friethoes, golden brown and super crispy.

Ras el hanout

The dessert is surprisingly good. Chocolate ganache cake with a concentrated mango purée that isn’t too sweet. But the star is the ras el hanout ice cream, which contains a generous amount of this Moroccan spice blend. The ice cream has so many flavors; we really just want to buy a liter to eat on the couch in the evening.

Neighborhood café plus

At first glance, Weesper looks like a lovely neighborhood café where you can work on your laptop during the day or have drinks with a bite to eat in the evening. But the food is of a much higher quality than you would expect in such a setting. We’ll definitely come back for the pork chop and dessert, and surely also for some bar snacks with beer when the sun is shining.

Weesper
Weesperzijde 144
Amsterdam