It’s been hard to know where to start with all the great places we ate, during the first week of our honeymoon in Amsterdam. We did all the usual stuff – we had pancakes (mine with apple and cinnamon, H’s with pear and chocolate sauce) sitting outside a cafe by the canal, we ate warm waffles with icing sugar whilst strolling around Keukenhof admiring the tulips, and had chips with mayonnaise from a stall at the Albert Cuypmarket. But we also experienced some really wonderful restaurants, which I managed to enjoy despite my steadily worsening cold severely hampering my taste buds and sense of smell!

Our top marks that week went to a restaurant which was conveniently located near our hotel, and was called Hemelse Modder. It was quite relaxed, but still felt like a ‘proper’ restaurant. H said it reminded him of the Lead Station in Chorlton, with the same atmosphere. The food was excellent. We both had the set menu, H starting with fennel and potato soup, and then a leek and ewe’s milk cheese strudel in the most astounding orange beurre-blanc sauce. He finished off with a plate of Dutch cheese with walnut and raisin bread. He also had an incredible Chablis that had this amazing caramel aftertaste. I’ve never had wine like that before. I had a beautiful starter of sweet herring on potato and egg salad, creme fraiche, watercress and beetroot chips with rye bread. Then a very simple steamed Rainbow trout with boiled potatoes and mange tout. As my appetite was a bit dampened due to my cold, this was perfect. This was followed by bread and butter pudding made from croissants and apricots, with plums on the side. All washed down with a couple of glasses of Dutch pilsner. A perfect meal. By the end of that particular evening, my cold was pretty bad and I felt dreadful, but as I said to H on the way to dinner, gastrogrrl can’t let a mere fever get in the way of a meal, the stomach is always willing, even when the rest of the body has given up!

Other highlights that week included a vegetarian restaurant called Vliegende Schotel, which looked like some scratty student place but actually served really good, solid, comforting food. This was our first meal out in Amsterdam and it felt like the first proper, ‘hearty’, home cooked food we’d had in days! Tucking into lasagne, and spicy bean & guacamole filled tortilla, with salad and rice, we felt like we’d been re-fuelled and were ready to go! We also enjoyed Werck, where we were treated to dinner by a friend of my mum’s who’d come to the wedding and was now coincidentally on business in Amsterdam. Sadly I didn’t note what we ate, but I think it was the company rather than the food that we were focusing on.

Prize for quirkiest restaurant went to ’11′, unsurprisingly located on the 11th floor of the Stedelijk Museum, which is temporarily located in the old post office, near Centraal Station, whilst its usual building is renovated. It looks like a grim, derelict tower block (inside and out). We’d gone there to visit the exhibition celebrating 60 years of the Magnum photographic agency – the only thing worth seeing there, as the rest of the modern art on show was, let’s face it, pants. The restaurant was pretty groovy though. I think it doubles as a bar/club in the evening. The decor was quite funky, lots of wooden tables, weird light fittings made of plant pot holders and dividing curtains of stringy bits of green plastic (should have taken photos!). It was all quite ‘urban’, but what impressed was the age range of the diners, from babies to grannies. Obviously nobody felt put off or alienated by their surroundings. There were some great views of the city from the restaurant too. We had some very tasty sandwiches there – I had pastrami, sauerkraut and tarragon mayonnaise on a crusty white roll, and H had Dutch cheese, lettuce and piccalilli on the biggest wedge of brown bread I’ve ever seen!

The restaurant that provided the most ‘comic relief’ was an Indonesian place called Soenda Kelapa. I was determined to try rijstaffel, an Indonesian speciality made up of lots of little dishes served with rice. The two restaurants in our guide book that we initially wanted to try were fully booked (well, it was Friday night) so we plumped for a slightly scruffy one next door, which did the job just as well. We had the vegetarian rijstaffel, and it felt like they pretty much brought out everything they had in the kitchen, from green beans to eggs to tempeh to satay to…I actually can’t remember, it was too much. The head waiter/owner reminded us of Marvin the Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, he just looked so depressed. He actually told us we couldn’t have one meat and one veggie rijstaffel as we wouldn’t have room on the table for all the dishes, but if we had two veggie ones we could combine the dishes and then we would have room. Not exactly the best customer service, being unable to choose certain meals because your table isn’t big enough!!

Anyway, it was a great week in Amsterdam. Each day the sun shone, the sky was blue, the canals and buildings were beautiful, and we were thoroughly spoiled by staying at a beautiful Art Nouveau hotel in a room with a free minibar (replenished every day), massive bed, a bath that seemed to be 6 feet deep and long, and a flat screen TV (on which H watched with delight as Liverpool beat Arsenal whilst he made the most of the free minibar). The hotel also had a pool (unusual for Amsterdam), steam room, sauna and jacuzzi. Great hotel, highly recommended, it’s called the Grand Hotel Amrath, and we’d go there again like a shot.

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