Year: 2009

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.