Dreamline to Amsterdam – By Chef Bill Walker / EPHS Culinary Arts Instructor

Dreamline to Amsterdam

Fries, Vermeer, Windmills, New Friends and a Shot of Paint Thinner

Rush has a song called “Dreamline,” about restless souls chasing adventure down distant highways. I’ve been humming it all week, because I just rode one of those highways myself. I flew to Amsterdam with a group of fellow teachers, all of us scouting ahead of international trips we’re taking with our students. Mine comes next February, a culinary tour of Italy with my culinary arts kids. So consider Amsterdam my spring training. I went to eat, and I took notes.

The French Fry Industrial Complex

Let’s start with the thing that stopped me in my tracks on day one. Amsterdam has stores, actual dedicated storefronts, that sell french fries and nothing else. Not fries as a side. Fries as the entire business model. And the lines. My God, the lines. Outside one of them, people queued down the block like the place was handing out winning lottery tickets instead of potatoes in a paper cone.

Here’s the thing. They’ve earned those lines. These are proper twice-fried frites, crisp shell, creamy center, served standing up in a cone with a little plastic fork that feels like a formality. I got mine with mayo, which sounds wrong to American ears and tastes completely right in person. Somewhere back home there’s a line cook dropping frozen crinkle cuts into dirty oil, and I want to fly him here for a field trip.

Stroopwafels

I know. I know. The stroopwafel is the beloved national cookie, two thin waffle layers glued together with caramel syrup, sold everywhere from markets to vending machines. People rhapsodize about them. They were in my giftbag when I arrived (along with a much needed power converter and a bag of paprika potato chips which were delicious)

Stroopwafels are overrated. There, I said it. It’s a fine cookie. It’s a pleasant cookie. It is not a life-changing cookie, and I’ve been lied to by every travel blogger who told me otherwise. Send your complaints to the management.

One of approximately 3 billion stroopwafel shops in the Netherlands.

Breakfast

The Dutch breakfast plate is a beautiful act of chaos. Salad, salami, ham, and turkey, all before eight in the morning. I stared at it the way you’d stare at a guy wearing a winter coat at the beach. Who ordered cold cuts and greens at sunrise? The Dutch did, apparently, and they’ve been doing it long enough that nobody blinks.

The rest of the spread was a full-on carb festival. Croissants, danish, muffins, cinnamon buns and breads. Bagels I can only describe as awful, a crime I forgave instantly because the chicken sausage was delicious. Great cheese too. Did I mention that the Dutch cheese game is on point? There was a machine that fresh-squeezes orange juice while you wait, whole oranges rolling down a chute to their glorious doom right in front of you. Across from it sat a self-serve machine cranking out cappuccino, latte, espresso, tea, and hot cocoa at the push of a button. As a guy who teaches teenagers to cook, I stood in front of that juice machine longer than some people stood in front of the Vermeers.

About Those Coffee Houses

Everyone knows what Amsterdam’s coffeeshops are famous for, and it isn’t the coffee. Rush once wrote a whole song called “Passage to Bangkok” about touring the world’s legendary smoking destinations, and somehow Amsterdam didn’t make the itinerary, which I consider the only flaw in Rush’s entire catalog. Here’s the plot twist nobody tells you: the coffee is fantastic. Legitimately excellent espresso, pulled with care, and every single cup arrives with two tiny Biscoff cookies riding shotgun on the saucer. Biscoff are a far superior cookie to stroopwafel and that is a hill I am willing to die on.

Pancakes

A note of clarification for my fellow Americans. The Dutch baby, that puffed oven pancake we know from stateside brunch menus, is pretty good here on its home turf. But the actual Dutch pancake, the pannenkoek, is a different animal entirely. It’s closer to a crepe, plate-sized and thin, served sweet or savory. We had one loaded with bacon and cheese, but I’ve also had them with bananas and nutella. Good, not great. The kind of dish where you nod, finish it, and don’t think about it again. As a guy who’s cooked a few thousand breakfasts, I respect the execution. I just wasn’t moved.

Bacon and Cheese pannenkoek

The Real Stars

Now for the food that did move me. At a hole in the wall, called Moaz Falafel, the falafel was wonderful, crisp and herby and fresh out of the fryer, and the shawarma was great, properly seasoned, properly shaved. The almond croissants at a little bakery called De Laatste Kruimel were spectacular, shattering layers and frangipane that tasted like actual almonds instead of a vague marzipan rumor. In fact, let me say this plainly and let the chips fall where they may: the croissants in Amsterdam’s bakeries are on par with those of France. I didn’t expect to type that sentence either. I also had a tomato quiche that would make a French grandmother slow clap in an outdoor cafe in the Hague.

And then I was served me a slice of warm Dutch apple pie at Winkel Bakery near the Rijksmuseum. Appeltaart, they call it, and it’s amazing. Deep, tall, packed with chunks of apple with a hint of caramel and a streusel topping wrapped in a crust with real structure. The French can keep their tarte tatin. The Dutch figured out apple pie, and they’re not even bragging about it, which somehow makes it taste even better.

And then there was the Indonesian dinner, the farewell meal of the trip. Nasi Uduk, giant communal bowls of rice hit the table surrounded by giant dishes of toppings. Meats and vegetables in sauces so tasty I started planning my second plate before finishing my first. There is something magical about communal plates shared and passed with a large group of new friends that moves the meal to the next level. Also, Nasi Uduk is a legacy of Dutch colonial history that turned into one of the great eating traditions in Europe, and if you visit Amsterdam and skip it, we can’t be friends.

Jenever

Jenever, sometimes spelled Genever, is the traditional national spirit of the Netherlands and the ancestor of modern gin. It was originally medicinal and thought to help the kidneys. That’s the history lesson. Here’s the tasting note: paint thinner. I’ve stripped varnish off furniture with gentler substances. The Dutch drink it with pride and a straight face, which tells you everything you need to know about Dutch fortitude. I finished mine because I was raised right, but my esophagus filed a formal complaint.

The Black Licorice Situation

While I’m airing grievances, a confession: I hate black licorice. Always have. So naturally I flew to a country that treats it like a food group. The Dutch call it drop, they eat more of it per person than anybody on the planet, and the stuff fills every shop window, salty, sweet, hard, soft, shaped like coins and cats and cars. The story goes back to 1890, when seemingly all of Amsterdam caught a cold at once and there was a run on the black gold. Licorice sales in the Netherlands picked up momentum, and that momentum never went away. More than a century of national commitment to a candy I can’t stand.

Here’s the part that worries me. In Italy, where I’m taking my students in February, they like the pure product, licorice root extract with as few additives as possible. Straight, uncut licorice. I’ve got seven months to practice my polite face.

It looks so pretty I almost forget that it taste like medicine

Beyond the Plate

Between meals, we saw more Rembrandt, Van Gogh, and Vermeer than you can shake a stick at, and more tulip bulbs and gorgeous flowers for sale than you can shake two sticks at. I ran out of sticks by day three.

Van Gogh Self Portrait and Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring

The biggest canvas of them all came with a twist. At the Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt’s Night Watch, the most famous painting in the Netherlands, is in the middle of a restoration that will take several years. And the museum didn’t ship it off to some basement lab. It’s being restored right there in the gallery, inside a giant glass enclosure, with the conservators working in full view of the crowd. So instead of just seeing a masterpiece, you watch a masterpiece and the people taking care of it at the same time. Forty years in kitchens taught me to respect anyone doing careful work while the whole world watches, and these folks do it with brushes the size of eyelashes.

The Night Watch in the process of being restored . It is approximately twelve feet wide by fourteen feet tall.

The Rijksmuseum wasn’t all Rembrandts and Vermeers, either. Tucked away in there is a whole room of weapons running from the 1600s into the early 1900s, swords and axes and full suits of armor, the kind of hardware that makes a guy who spends his life around knives feel both right at home and badly outclassed. I went in for the paintings and left thinking about steel.

The “I’m coming to kick your ass in 1830 Starter Pack” at the Rijksmuseum

The Rhythm of the City

The streets come with a soundtrack, and it isn’t what you’d expect. Street musicians everywhere, playing classical music on violins and cellos, sometimes a whole string section sawing away beside a canal. You haven’t lived until you’ve eaten fries out of a paper cone while somebody nails Vivaldi twenty feet away.

The shopping was great, the canals were endless, and we crossed a zillion bridges to prove it. Most of those bridges have a decorative bike parked on the railing, and photographing it is apparently a rite of passage. Nobody rides these bikes. They exist purely to be photographed. We took the photo. You will too. We also toured a diamond factory, where I watched people handle more money in an hour than I’ve made in forty years of cooking, and they did it with tweezers.

I learned the origin of the three X’s on Amsterdam’s flag, which is not the story the souvenir shops in a certain neighborhood would lead you to guess. And I learned how the Dutch drained the water out of a marsh to build this city in the first place. Spoiler: it’s the windmills. It’s always the windmills.

Kinderdijk

Which brings me to the highlight of the whole trip, Kinderdijk, a UNESCO World Heritage site lined with working windmills.