Cafe ‘t Arendsnest, Herengracht 90, Amsterdam
Besides complaining about everything all the time going on in the rest of the world, I like to post sometimes about local businesses. Sometimes I have nice things to say, and sometimes not so nice. In this case, Steph and I found a really nice local brewpub a few weeks ago, specialising in Dutch beers.
The thought of a cold frosty Dutch beer might send shivers through some of us, especially the more well known ones like Heineken or Amstel. You will find these on the menu here, but much more interestingly you’ll also find a beer or two from each of the other 50 or so Dutch breweries. In the Belgian tradition, many of the beers are sold in their own special glasses.
The menu is in English and Dutch, with descriptions of most of the beers, together with lots of general information about the beers and the cafe itself. The beers are clearly organized into large and small breweries, so there won’t be the problem of ordering a mass market beer by mistake. Among the beers they have on tap, 9 of the taps are set aside for ‘guest beers’, so you are likely to find some special brews made in small batches here.
Many of the beers are from parts of the country far from Amsterdam, like Friesland or Limburg. These places have very different cultures, and drinking their beers can be a nice way of connecting to these places.
There are also lots of other interesting drinks on offer (alcoholic and non), not all of them local, but there is a clear emphasis of high quality and interesting in the list.
One of the nicest surprises was the cost of the beer. As many of us are aware, brewpubs serving hand crafted beers are not always known to be the cheapest places to go. While not unusually cheap, their prices were very fair and in line with other mainstream bars in the city. When you consider this place has one of the hotest locations in the city, they don’t take advantage of this for purposes of over-charging. Watch out, as this can always change over time.
If you are a tourist, wary of walking into a foreign bar for fear of either being taken advantage of or lost in a sea of locals, you don’t have to worry about either of those things here. It has a nice multi-cultural atmosphere. By my count, the evening I was there, about half the customers were English speaking. The staff not only speaks perfect English, but they have gone to some trouble to translate the menu into English in a way that’s easier to understand from a cultural standpoint. Sometimes when you read translated Dutch it doesn’t make a lot of sense, because it’s just word for word translated or summarized and cultural differences aren’t explained. Their menu on the other hand reads a little differently in the two languages, the English is pretty close to what would come from a native speaker and the information is very complete.
You may be tempted to go to a Belgian beerpub instead of a Dutch one, as there are a number of those around the city and Belgian beer is better known among beer geeks. One of the problems these days is there has been a lot of consolidation among Belgian breweries and most are now owned by large corporations. It’s very hard to know any more what’s really a hand crafted Belgian beer. A decade or two ago the situation was the other way around, as the larger breweries were in Holland and the hand crafted beer was in Belgium, but times have changed.
One final word of warning. Not all the beers combine well with respect to hangovers! Consider just enjoying a few at a time, and come back another time to try some more.
This is great – we are planning a trip to Amsterdam – in Feb. – staying near Schiphol – could you recommend any good places to go to buy gardening tools – I think that Holland must have a better selection than Ireland…
Hi Anna!
It would be nice to see you when you come.
Honestly, I struggle to get good gardening tools. I mostly end up at chain garden centers or hardware stores, buying stuff from China.
Not too far from Schiphol, in Hoofddorp, is this place:
http://www.meijdebie.nl/
They sell mostly power tools, but they do have a small selection of hand tools. They can get lots of stuff by special order (I got my weed burner this way: http://www.patnsteph.net/weblog/?p=21 ). There’s no way to take public transportation there, only a car or taxi, and I can’t honestly say I think it would be worth that much trouble.
Another place that sells very nice copper tools, and is very far away from Amsterdam is this place:
http://www.kopersporen.nl (sorry, only in Dutch!)
There is a place in the UK that sells some of the same tools here (so you can read about them in English):
http://www.implementations.co.uk/
If you want to order some of these tools in advance and have them sent to me, I’d be glad to give them to you when you’re here. I think the store is too far away to visit.
Beyond this, there are a few garden centers or large chain hardware stores. For example Gamma or Praxis. These too mostly require a car or taxi ride. If you want to know more about where these are near Schiphol or Amsterdam, let me know and I’ll email you a list.
Excellent blog my friend, I too may be taking a trip in your direction sometime in the near future! Please keep blogs like this coming from time to time as I really enjoy reading this type of stuff.
Oh – it’s an excellent bar. When we stay in Amsterdam we always try to get an apartment within walking distance. Wonderful Dutch beers, and carefully chosen too. I like Belgian beers but it’s good to find a bar specialising in Dutch beer.
Next time we visit we’d like it to coincide with the Open Gardens Weekend (usually June I think).
Easygardener, and anyone else planning to visit Amsterdam, just let me know and we can try to plan something. I’m always happy to meet readers and fellow bloggers!
Easygardener, we haven’t done open gardens in several years. We live in the Jordaan, and our neighboorhood has their own day. When we do visit gardens it’s usually our local ones.
I was thinking of this Patrick. Though we can’t do it this year. Hope to visit next year.
http://www.grachtenmusea.nl/engels/open_tuinen_dagen.php
Hi EG,
The link you provide is to a very large event, and the central canal neighborhood where these gardens are is the wealthiest in the city. There are lots of people from all over who come to Amsterdam for this, and many of the gardens belong to movie stars and other famous people.
The Jordaan, where we live, has a reputation as a yuppie neighborhood, but it’s not quite so high class as the main canal district. The gardens in our neighborhood are called ‘hofjes’, and some are open to the public all the time. There are special tourist guides that have suggested tours. Many of them are private, but are open during our own neighborhood Open Garden days. It’s much more of a neighborhood affair, and most people attending are Dutch speakers. There’s very little promotion of the event, usually only a few posters placed around the neighborhood. Many of these gardens show what you can do in a very small space, in limited circumstances rather than the grand canal gardens.
Anyway, they haven’t announced a day this year, and all I could find on the Internet about it was this automatically-translated-from-Dutch page:
http://tinyurl.com/7jdfzw
When we visit gardens, this is the event we usually go on. It’s been a few years since we’ve done it though.