Back to Homepage	Restaurants and Meals in Amsterdam Dinner	Browse Other Pages Homepage Very First Trip to Amsterdam Amsterdam - A Quick Orientation The Trolleys of Amsterdam Restaurants and Meals in Amsterdam --- Breakfast in Amsterdam --- Lunch in Amsterdam --- Afternoon Snacks in Amsterdam --- Dinner in Amsterdam --- Drinking in Amsterdam --- Restaurants Serving Koffietafel --- Sandwich Shops in Amsterdam --- Sandwich Shops - Uitsmijters --- Bami Goreng Nasi Goreng --- Amsterdam: Sidewalk Cafe Sitting Hotels in Amsterdam --- Canal-House Hotels in Amsterdam Tourist Information Amsterdam Seeing Amsterdam Amsterdam: A Canal Boat Ride A Visit to Brewery Amsterdam A Visit to a Diamond Cutter The Home of Anne Frank The Home of Rembrandt Our Lord in the Attic Canal Mansions in Amsterdam The Begijnhof in Amsterdam The Waag in Amsterdam Walks Around Town - Amsterdam Excursions Outside Amsterdam The Sailors' Quarter The Tropical Museum in Amsterdam Amsterdam: The Rijksmuseum The Stedelijk (Municipal) Museum ..................... Netherlands General Information The Low Countries: The Netherlands Netherlands Railways History of Amsterdam and Netherlands Prehistory of Belgium, Netherlands If You Saw Holland from a Flying... Dutch Art The World of Van Gogh 'Dutch' Religious Tolerance Hollanders Ashame the Name of... Migration to Netherlands Old Domestic Architecture Evolution of the Dutch Nation Cultural Change in the European Union
	But now we arrive at the normal, hot-meal-serving restaurants of Amsterdam, to which most people go at night (although they can obviously patronize them at lunchtime, as well). These include restaurants of every nationality and kind—Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, you name it—but the most unusual, and the ones for which Amsterdam is particularly famed, are the Indonesian and Chinese-Indonesian restaurants serving "rijsttafel." You can't pass through Amsterdam without sampling this glorious meal at least once! Rijsttafel Restaurants Rijsttafel (literally, "rice table") is a meal the Dutch discovered during the days of their empire in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia); it consists of a central, large dish of rice, surrounded by as many as twenty (that's right, twenty) other smaller dishes, each including a serving of unusually-prepared, and often fairly spicy, meat or vegetables. One or two at a time, you transfer the contents of the little dishes onto the big pile of rice, eat the rice and its condiments together, and then cool your red-hot throat with big draughts of cold Dutch beer. Not all the dishes are as spicy as I may have implied, however, and the more cautious eaters can put together a rijsttafel meal that is memorable and unique—even though not spicy. What's in the little dishes that surround your main bowl of rice? To describe them best, I should describe the best-known of Amsterdam's rijsttafel restaurants, which is the famed but relatively expensive Bali, 95 Leidsestraat (three short blocks below the Leidse-plein). They serve dish rijsttafel consisting of rice, soup, pork in soya sauce, meat in madera sauce, steamed meat, liver in a special sauce, eggs in sauce, sweet potatoes, bean sprouts, roast pork on sticks, fried bananas, stuffed omelet, vegetables in peanut sauce, cucumber in sour sauce, mixed sour vegetables, fruit in a sweet and sour sauce, and fried grated coconut. Now you know what a rijsttafel is. No budget tourist, however, need pay as much as the Bali asks, because other restaurants in town—particularly those on the famous Binnen Bantammerstraat—offer a nearly-equivalent rijsttafel for far less money. Simply ask a resident for the location of the Binnen Bantammerstraat, which is a street in the area to the south-east of the railroad station. There you'll discover, in one block, no fewer than six restaurants serving rijsttafel. Try, in particular, the Azie, 9 Binnen Bantammerstraat; the Kong Hing, 11 Binnen Bantammerstraat; or the Ling Nam, 3 Binnen Bantammerstraat. I prefer the first two, but after having eaten at each at least twice, can't decide which I like best! Friendly, unpretentious atmosphere—and good rijsttafel—at both. A slightly-more-expensive version of these multi-item dinners can be had at the tiny, but well-located, Kow Loon, 498 Singel, on the street of the Amsterdam flower market, just 50 yards away from the Nieuw England Department Store and the beginning of the Leidsestraat. Here, a 13-item rijsttafel, 18-items sell for few dollars, and the same 18 items can be served to two persons. Finally, on the Nieuwendijk (that shopping street that parallels the Damrak), you can have a 12-dish rijsttafel at the somewhat plain, but utterly authentic, Djakarta Restaurant, 89 Nieuwendijk; and a 9-item rijsttafel at the little Ton Sing Restaurant, located where the Nieuwendijk meets the Singel, at 1 Singel. In the "sailors' district," at 61 Oude Zijds Voorburgwaal, almost directly across that canal from the Oude Kerk (old church), the Xin Balkans offers one last rijsttafel opportunity: 12 courses, 15 courses for inexpensive price, plus 15% service, and plus the cost of your beverage, of course. The Normal Dinners Now we move into the less exotic areas of Dutch cuisine. And because we've listed a great many lunchtime spots where you can eat well (the restaurants serving Hollandsche Koffietafels, for instance; the sandwich shops; the Chinese-Indonesian restaurants with their bami goreng and nasi goreng), we can now afford to splurge a bit—surveying, first, the restaurants offering full evening meals. Home