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Humphrey's

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Restaurant | "Dining with Humphrey"

A spicy soup Photo - Humphrey's, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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My most recent visit to Amsterdam was for a meeting with thirty colleagues. We needed a place that could handle a large party, ideally located somewhere we could reach using public transport. The place we chose was Humphrey’s on Nieuwezijds Kolk, about five minutes walk from both the Central Station and Dam Square. We found out there were two Humphrey’s in Amsterdam after our secretary booked the wrong one which is on Spuistraat. So double check that you are all going to the right place.We were staying at a hotel in the north west of the city and took a bus to Central Station and then walked down Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal. Several of us had been before and know Humphreys as ‘the...Read More

Member Rating 3 out of 5 on February 7, 2013

Humphrey's
Nieuwezijds Kolk 23
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland

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Rosarium

Best Of IgoUgo

Restaurant | "A Cool Place to Eat - Part Two"

Interior view Photo - Rosarium, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Whilst we waited for the starters we all started to realise that we’d probably made a tactical error not choosing hot starters. When the soup arrived – a beautiful delicate green cream soup which was poured gently around a row of crayfish sprinkled with pea sprouts – I think the five cold starter orderers were all thinking "Oops". The temperature was the least of our worries. The tuna had been described as " Tuna served with sweet peppers, cream of avocado, Wasabi crackers & herb salad". I don’t know what I’d been expecting but I’m sure it included something with at least a hint of flavour. The tuna was practically sashimi with just the outermost couple of millimetres seared. Dots of green avocado...Read More

Whilst we waited for the starters we all started to realise that we’d probably made a tactical error not choosing hot starters. When the soup arrived – a beautiful delicate green cream soup which was poured gently around a row of crayfish sprinkled with pea sprouts – I think the five cold starter orderers were all thinking "Oops". The temperature was the least of our worries. The tuna had been described as " Tuna served with sweet peppers, cream of avocado, Wasabi crackers & herb salad". I don’t know what I’d been expecting but I’m sure it included something with at least a hint of flavour. The tuna was practically sashimi with just the outermost couple of millimetres seared. Dots of green avocado cream (we prayed it was wasabi but it wasn’t and wondered WHY it wasn’t since it really did need to be) were spaced along the plates and little bits of grassy stuff were sprinkled on top and what looked like a green prawn cracker was perched on top. The so-called ‘Wasabi crackers’ were singular and had no wasabi taste at all. My boss tucked into the first piece of tuna and declared "This tastes of absolutely nothing at all".

The other tuna eater and I tried and agreed. I don’t know if the fish was too cold but it really was totally tasteless. We asked if they had anything to put on it – some ginger, wasabi, even just salt and pepper. We managed to get the salt and pepper and in desperation I asked for mustard to give some kind of kick to the totally bland dish but the ginger was apparently ‘frozen’. So were we. I ate it because I was hungry and afterwards I realised there were no ‘sweet peppers’ at all and the ‘herb salad’ was just tiny little salad leaves rather than herbs. Disappointment all round.

Another waitress came to collect the dishes and cannot help but have noticed that a lot had been left. "Was everything OK?" she asked and we couldn’t really bring ourselves to lie any more than we could bring ourselves to tell the truth. We all learned a lesson from our diplomatic French colleague – who had the soup and had done best of all of use – who just answered "Thank you". We decided henceforth our response to "Did you like it?" and similar questions will be "Thank you" and we will resist the temptation to respond "My cat wouldn’t touch that if he hadn’t eaten for a week and only had the alternative of a three week dead mouse corpse".

Maybe the main courses would lift our spirits. Certainly we were pleased to know that the soup bowl had arrived piping hot so maybe we could warm our blue fingers on the main course dishes. My monkfish was served on a square slate and it was indeed REALLY hot. It’s just a desperate shame that the food wasn’t more than lukewarm. Everyone complained that the food wasn’t hot enough – probably because we were eating in Arctic conditions. On the plus side the people who had the vegetarian pasta said it was OK. The person who’d ordered the tuna starter we’d all just slagged off, looked at her plate like they’d served up the old mouse my cat had preferred and the USA steak was not at all what had been expected. Back to the monkfish and time for an examination of what went wrong.

The dish was described as "Monkfish, served with 2 kinds of chicory, creamy black salsify and a sauce of nutmeg". Firstly there’s no need to have more than one type of chicory – it’s chicory and it’s not very nice served half-hot. I got a ‘head’ (or what do you call it when it’s chicory) sliced down the middle and served that way, warm, slimy and unpleasant. The second chicory must have been the small chunks of something slimy in the sauce which was not identifiable as nutmeg flavoured. And where was the ‘creamy black salsify’? I’m not one hundred percent sure I’d know salsify but there was NOTHING black on my plate except the slate itself. You’ll also maybe notice NO CARBOHYDRATE on either my starter or my main course. Perhaps some potatoes, some rice, some noodles or even some bloomin’ ‘quinoa’ might have meant I’d left the restaurant without a rumbling tummy. The monkfish had neither the appearance nor texture of normal monkfish and was much too cold. The others tried to wind me up by saying it looked like chicken.

The only enjoyable part of the main course was my Belgian colleague telling us she’d dreamt the night before about going swimming in chocolate custard. She discussed at length how she’d tried to work out whether to swim with her mouth open and how to stop the custard sliding through her fingers. Would she float or sink and which stroke would be best suited to swimming in custard – and of course, what temperature should it be. It’s a shame the food wasn’t half as entertaining as her second hand dreams.

I think we were all hungry and we debated puddings. They were not cheap at a minimum price of €12.50 but maybe they would fill us up and we could have hot drinks. In the end we decided we couldn’t take the cold any more. One colleague had lost the feeling in his feet and put his coat back on. We would go back to the cosy warmth of the Novotel and order a coffee there. We asked for the bill "As quickly as possible please" and headed back to the more civilised temperature of the hotel. I asked my boss what it came to and the bill was over €300 for six two-course meals with barely enough food (even if it had been any good) to fill the tummy of a starvation victim, a bottle of wine and a few soft drinks. At more than €50 per person I cannot consider this offered even a vague impersonation of good value.

If I were invited back to Rosarium I would have to think very hard about whether to say no and stay in the hotel instead. I can’t fault the way the waitress ‘tried’ to do her best but she was fighting a losing battle. The food was cold and second rate and unforgivably lacking in anything flavoursome, ingredients were missing from both my dishes and the price was ridiculous for what we had. I wouldn’t mind returning for a drink on a summer evening but I cannot recommend this as a place to eat. Even if the temperature of the room had been OK, the food wasn’t good enough. They need to try a lot harder.

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Member Rating 1 out of 5 on January 19, 2013

Rosarium
Amstelpark 1
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland
20-644-4085

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Rosarium

Best Of IgoUgo

Restaurant | "A Cool Place to Eat - Part One"

Tasteless Tuna Photo - Rosarium, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Another month and back in Amsterdam again. This month we have the added complication of dealing with quite deep snowfalls which meant we needed to think a bit more carefully about where to go and how to get there. Of course we’ve got to eat and so this month we tried to keep things simple and eat near to the hotel to avoid walking too far in the snow. I think we probably picked the very closest possible option to the Novotel on Europaboulevard and went for a place called Rosarium which is situated on the other side of the road within the grounds of the Amstel Park. I’m fairly ashamed to admit that despite staying regularly in the Novotel for the last 4 years, I hadn’t actually realised there was a par...Read More

Another month and back in Amsterdam again. This month we have the added complication of dealing with quite deep snowfalls which meant we needed to think a bit more carefully about where to go and how to get there. Of course we’ve got to eat and so this month we tried to keep things simple and eat near to the hotel to avoid walking too far in the snow. I think we probably picked the very closest possible option to the Novotel on Europaboulevard and went for a place called Rosarium which is situated on the other side of the road within the grounds of the Amstel Park. I’m fairly ashamed to admit that despite staying regularly in the Novotel for the last 4 years, I hadn’t actually realised there was a park right opposite. We live and learn.

For those who like to know the punch line up front so they can decide whether to bother with the details that follow, Rosarium was absolutely dreadful. Six of us ate there and six of us agreed it was the worst team dinner we’d ever had – and we’ve had some pretty dodgy ones. Normally I’m the one who thinks it was rubbish and everyone else says it’s not so bad, but this time we had complete unanimity; NOBODY will ever willingly go back.

Rosarium is located in a beautiful modern building with high ceilings and large glass windows and – the clue is in the name – it’s surrounded by the park’s rose garden. I have to take their word for that as everything was totally covered in snow. And the snow gives a good clue to one of the two main reasons we hated our dinner – the building was so cold that we wondered if we’d accidentally booked into the Ice Bar and they’d forgotten to bring us the fur hats. I have never been in a restaurant that was so cold. The architecture was partly to blame, the weather mostly to blame but the restaurant has to have a plan on how to avoid chilling their customers. It’s not like it was unseasonably cold weather – it snows in January in Holland, get used to it. It wasn’t Antigua or Indonesia where they could reasonably be expected to not be prepared for snow. To be fair the waitress warned us they had some issues with the temperature and tried to find us a slightly less freezing corner to sit in but we were stupidly cold and if we’d realised HOW bad it was going to be, then we would have said "Thanks but no thanks" and phoned out for a pizza.

The restaurant looks very stylish. The main dining area is round and we sat on curved benches at the edge of the room, noticing the seriously high ceilings and the massive chandeliers without realising this was going to be like eating in a frozen warehouse. We have several of those at work, so we know frozen warehouses and we wouldn’t choose to eat in them.

The waitress took our drinks orders, brought us menus, delivered some olives and bread rolls and tried to warm us with her sunny smile. It was like trying to warm Buckingham Palace with a single Bunsen burner. The waitress described the ‘specials’ but they didn’t sound too special to us so we asked for the full menu which was very small but had a few dishes that sounded like they might be interesting. Two of us don’t eat meat and she warned us that she only had five portions of monkfish. Bearing in mind there were only 10 diners in the whole restaurant, it didn’t seem like too much of a risk that we’d be beaten to the punch on the sea-devil.
The rolls were good and we shivered away on our seats feeling sure that sooner or later we’d get used to it. I eventually remembered a seminar I once went to about how you really don’t adjust to cold – unlike adapting to a room that smells bad or is smoky which you can adapt to, cold is cold and you can’t stop noticing.

Starter options included a tuna dish, scallops served with a vegetable none of us had ever heard of, a steak tartare, something that sounded disgusting and had been done to a pig cheek, a split pea soup with crayfish and a vegetarian salad of quinoa and goat cheese. We opted for three portions of tuna, a vegetarian salad, a soup and the ‘special’ tuna which was served with some strange Japanese fruit and vegetables. For main courses we opted for two vegetarian pastas, a so-called ‘USA steak’, two monkfish and one colleague ordered a second starter as her main course. The menu was not cheap. The cheapest starter was the soup at €12.50 and the most expensive €17.50 for the pig cheek ‘thing’. My tuna starter was an outrageous €16 so I was hoping for something really good. Main courses started at €19.50 for the vegetarian pasta and rose to a shocking €26 for the monkfish.
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Member Rating 1 out of 5 on January 19, 2013

Rosarium
Amstelpark 1
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland
20-644-4085

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De Kas

Best Of IgoUgo

Restaurant | "Putting Down Roots in the Greenhouse"

The greenhouse at night Photo - De Kas, Amsterdam, Netherlands

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Another month means another Amsterdam team meeting and another team dinner and since it’s December the Christmas spirit meant the boss was willing to push the boat out a bit and take us somewhere a special. The restaurant which was chosen was ‘De Kas’ in the south east of the city. To tell the truth I have absolutely no idea where I was. I just got into the taxi with everyone else and found myself somewhere completely new, in the dark on a cold frosty evening. ‘De Kas’is a restaurant inside a large greenhouse in the middle of a park and we could see the lights glowing from the main road as we passed over a little bridge and walked alongside the canal.I had been told to expect a treat by a ...Read More

Member Rating 4 out of 5 on December 13, 2012

De Kas
Kamerlingh Onneslaan 3
Amsterdam, Noord-Holland 1097
020-462-4562

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Amsterdam Restaurant Delikeet

Best Of IgoUgo

Restaurant | "Sashimi that's worth the walk"

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Delikeet is not a place you’re going to stumble across – in fact I am not sure I could find it again without a bunch of other people to follow or a Sat Nav. I’d long heard from another colleague about his favourite place in south Amsterdam and I suspect – since we found him walking along as we made our way there – that this was the place he’d been recommending for so long. Delikeet is in an area that’s mostly residential with a few shops but not many. If you know Amsterdam, it’s just south of the E19/A10 also known as the Ringway Zuid. It’s equidistant from the Amsterdam Zuid and RAI railway stations and about a 15-20 minute walk from either. The nearest Metro stop is A. J. Ernststraat and...Read More

Delikeet is not a place you’re going to stumble across – in fact I am not sure I could find it again without a bunch of other people to follow or a Sat Nav. I’d long heard from another colleague about his favourite place in south Amsterdam and I suspect – since we found him walking along as we made our way there – that this was the place he’d been recommending for so long.

Delikeet is in an area that’s mostly residential with a few shops but not many. If you know Amsterdam, it’s just south of the E19/A10 also known as the Ringway Zuid. It’s equidistant from the Amsterdam Zuid and RAI railway stations and about a 15-20 minute walk from either. The nearest Metro stop is A. J. Ernststraat and you can get there on Tram 5 or Tram 51. We stay at the Novotel close to the RAI station and walked from there on a chilly November evening.

The restaurant is nothing remarkable to look at from the outside especially in winter.We entered via a doorway with a typically Dutch heavy black curtain hanging on a circular rail. This is handy if one or two people enter together as it stops the cold air rushing in but it’s pretty tricky to manage with ten people. Inside we found a dining area with tables for perhaps 30 to 40 people in total. Only two of these were already occupied when we rolled in at about 7.30 and aside from those people, I don’t think more than another two to four people came in all evening.

The interior is decorated with some of the most spectacular flower displays and the ugliest portraits I've ever seen. We had booked a table for eight but thanks to running into two other colleagues on the way there we needed a table for ten. The staff reorganised the layout of the tables without a fuss even though it meant we pretty much blocked the pathway through the restaurant. Perhaps they knew that nobody else was booked in that evening. One of our locally based colleagues had turned up early – or rather it's more correct to say she turned up on time and we were all late. She'd started on the wine so when we were offered a choice of three white wines, she made a strong case for the Pinot Grigio and we were easily persuaded. We ordered a bottle of the pinot and a bottle of red although I wasn't paying any attention to which type as I'm not a red wine drinker.

My biggest bug-bear about Amsterdam restaurants is slow and lousy service. It's not unusual to be sitting in a restaurant for an hour without even getting a drink or seeing a menu. Thankfully this didn't happen at Delikeet at all. I suspect that our group secretary had done a deal with the restaurant and agreed a very restricted menu in order to speed things up and possibly keep the price down. As a result each course offered a choice of only three dishes. Having checked the menus on line, it looks like you can get some amazing food if you're not on a special deal so I'd be interested to go back and try Delikeet again with a bit more freedom to choose what I want.

With drinks poured, the waitress (or for all I know she might have been the owner) came to tell us the menu. Yes, I said 'tell us'! Rather than hand out a list of our choices she stood at one end of the table and recited the options then moved to the other end and repeated them. Then back to the first end to take our orders. For starters and mains there were a choice of vegetarian, fish or meaty dishes. The starters were a goat cheese and mushroom 'thing', tuna and salmon sashimi, and steak tartar. Anyone spotted the weirdness of two RAW starters? I was amazed that any restaurant would apparently be so desperate to save on the electricity bill that they'd give you a choice of raw meat or raw fish. For mains the choices were a steak – I think it was tournedos but don't hold me to that, I've not had meat in 25 years – a sea bass dish and a vegetarian risotto. Predictably enough I went 'fish-fish' which seemed only slightly less bizarre than people going steak-steak.

Whilst we waited for our orders we were offered thick slices of delicious, crusty granary bread with a choice of olive oil or butter.

Starters arrived in good time – no doubt helped by two of the three options being uncooked. The mushroom and goat cheese dish was grilled and declared by those who had it to be very good. The steak tartar looked absolutely disgusting and rather too much like baby food. Obviously I've never eaten steak tartar but I've seen a lot of it, especially in the days when I used to go to eastern Europe in the mid 1990s when it seemed to be a particular favourite. I've always seen it as a dish you 'construct' yourself, mixing together the various components like raw egg and onion into coarsely minced beef. This was a pre-mixed steak tartar that was so finely mushed that it turned my stomach to look at it and one of the group said she'd been up half the night after eating it. Given that her main course was a veg risotto, it's hard to imagine it wasn't the steak tartar that got things moving.

In contrast to the icky-looking steak tartar, my sashimi was out of this world. I mentioned in a recent sushi restaurant review that I feared I'd lost my raw fish 'mojo' but this confirmed it was back with great force. A black slate was laid out with a row of five or six slabs of raw salmon and the same number of pieces of raw tuna. Wasabi and soy sauce were supplied for us to adjust to taste. I started with the salmon, saving the tuna as it's my favourite, and preferring not to mix the two flavours too much. I chomped through the salmon thinking how fabulously fresh and juicy it was and then the tuna blew my head off with its sheer excellence. I could happily have skipped my main course and asked for the same again. Checking the online menu, this dish would set you back €15.50 which is a lot for a starter, even one of this great quality. Steak tartar would cost €13.50 and I've not been able to find an indicative price for the goat cheese dish.

We'd got off to a great start and I was excited to see what the mains would bring. We didn't have too long to wait fortunately and the steaks arrived first each accompanied by a metal stand holding a paper cone of chips. The colleagues who's asked for steak had given a really diverse mixture of instructions on how they wanted it cooked and each said they got what they'd requested. Only one person went for the risotto and I was glad I'd skipped it as it just looked a bit boring. Our sea bass came with a mound of cous cous and two fillets of fish crossed on top. It wasn't the most memorable of flavour combinations or particularly striking presentation but the food quality was excellent and nobody left much uneaten.

A week after the dinner I was struggling to remember what I'd had for pudding. Normally I don't feel much interested in pudding and give it a miss but I could remember I'd had something but not what it was and I had to interrogate my colleagues to see if they could remember. I recalled that there's been something chocolatey, a crème brulee and that some had managed to persuade the restaurant to give them some berries that weren't on the menu. I knew I'd not had any of these but I was reminded I'd had a cheesecake with lemon sorbet. No wonder I'd forgotten as the cheesecake had been deeply disappointing and totally forgettable.

Coffees and mint teas were requested by a few of the group and then the boss paid up – my apologies, I didn't catch sight of the bill – and we headed back to the hotel. I would estimate that the three course menu was probably similar to the menu price I've seen on line which was €36,50 a head. It's not a bargain but the food and service were so much better than other places where we've paid similar prices that I'd go back again on the strength of the sashimi alone.
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Member Rating 4 out of 5 on November 24, 2012

Amsterdam Restaurant Delikeet
Willem Van Weldammelaan 4
Amsterdam, Netherlands
020 6613730

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