What We Love: Bar Menus
FavorFlav’s Marjan loves eating at the bar. Where she towers above the dining room buzz and has a perfect overview of the tables. Where she can watch people eat, with simpler dishes than at the table. The separate bar menu (not the drinks menu, that is). When will a bar menu finally become standard in the hospitality industry?
Here, you’ll usually find a bar menu at most in a hotel bar. It’s typically something associated with hotel hospitality. Which often has a separate, yet somehow connected hotel bar.
One More Beer
For about five years now, no new restaurant has opened here without its own bar, but so far it has almost exclusively been used for an aperitif or one more beer. You still eat at the table. But I love eating at the bar. Also because of the separate menu, the bar menu. With slightly less pretentious dishes than at the table. Cheese and charcuterie boards. Fish and oysters. To go with them: house bubbles, wine or beer from the ice bucket on the bar.
In the Netherlands, only a few restaurants still offer two menus, one for the restaurant and one for the bar. But since the opening of Amsterdam’s Café Caron by Alain ‘Masterchef’ Caron and his two sons, that may well be about to change. Seven examples in the capital with a bar menu.
Café Caron
This pleasantly raucous ‘restaurant café’ is already a favorite. But the Le Bar menu makes it even more so. Featuring Zeeland flat oysters (every bar menu should have oysters), charcuterie, cheese, Ortiz sardines (every bar menu should have tinned sardines), Iberico rillettes… I rest my case.
Grand Café Krasnapolsky
Strictly speaking, the bar at this Grand Café doesn’t have a bar menu. But its daily hors d’oeuvre hour comes close. A bar with a display case full of snacks from which you can choose a selection with your drink. As a prelude to dinner. Or instead of it. Spicy boiled mussels, raw tuna, oysters… Only between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m., after a bell is rung.
Pulitzer’s Bar
American comfort food to go with the craft cocktails at the bar of Jansz. restaurant. Featuring the ultimate bar-menu classic: Caesar salad. Also: braised meatballs, hot wings and parmesan Fritz’s (fries with herbs and freshly grated Parmesan). Chef Cassidy Hallman: ‘A good bar menu should lift your spirits and not be too high-end. Bar snacks such as truffle popcorn and deviled eggs. But hot wings are the most classic.’
Kaagman & Kortekaas
You can spontaneously drop in here for house-made charcuterie and oysters at the bar. Which happens to occupy the best spot in the entire restaurant, with a panoramic view of two sides of the dining room as well as the open kitchen. That’s where a bar should be situated. And the bar food tastes great.
Restaurant Wyers
The newest hotel restaurant in Amsterdam, at Kimpton De Witt hotel , has a bar and a menu full of American comfort food with a Dutch twist. Such as the chef’s boards from the land, sea and farmyard. With Dutch items like goose rillettes, cured sardines, smoked eel and—yes—lobster rolls. The fact that this lovely bar menu can also be ordered at the table: all the better!
Mama Makan
The restaurant at the newly opened Hyatt Regency Hotel in Amsterdam serves a mix of Indonesian and European food at the table. The bar menu also displays this ambiguity, with both satay and a frikandel (with curry, ketchup, mayo and onion), kibbeling, house pâté and a cheese or meat board.
Scheepskameel
This restaurant has a terrace menu disguised as a bar menu. Featuring oysters from Grevelingen, fried fish of the day, ossenworst and even an ice cream sundae. German bubbles on the side and nobody will get me to the table again.
