Amsterdam Part I

On our first night in Amsterdam, we ate at the very cozy Eetcafe Rosereijn (Haarlemmerdijk 52) just down the street from the apartment we rented. We shared the beef stew special and a mozzarella, tomato and pesto salad.


We also drank many little glasses of Jupiler.


The most delicious frites with deliciously unctuous frits saus (aka delicious Dutch mayo) from Cafe Stevens Nieuwmarkt B.V. (Koningsstraat 3hs). I had a couple Palms and Dan also had a mint tea that was made by pouring hot water over a bunch of mint leaves. It was nice and refreshing. Did I mention it was snowing? What started off as a whipping rain, turned into a really beautiful snow of large flakes.


Tampopo (Haarlemmerdijk 168) is a stylish Asian specialty food shop, also located down our street. It looked great, but smelled kinda funky. I didn't appreciate the can of kimchi being lumped in the Japanese section but other than that, it's hard to not love a store named for a movie about the pursuit of a perfect bowl of ramen.


Ok, so we had some special baked treats at went to the Van Gogh museum. Afterwards I tried to lead us to Japanese Pancake World, but as my cognitive functions were still failing me, we wound up getting lost in the tiny streets of the Jordaan neighborhood. Eventually, we got back to the area we were staying in and we were starving. De Vries (Haarlemmerijk 1o8A was right across the street and we stumbled in. We ordered steak sandwiches and I, not realizing our sandwiches came with salads, also ordered a salad. Then Dan thought he saw nachos on the table across the way, so we asked for that. Moments later Dan realized the the nachos were not nachos, but in fact a floral centerpiece. But it turns out that De Vries does serve nachos and they were awful. They were made with paprika flavored Doritos. The food took forever to come out and because the meat was thrown on the grill in a lump half of it was cooked and the other half was raw.