Amsterdam for foodies

Best restaurants

Amsterdam eats like a port city — multiple cuisines arriving from multiple directions, none of them pretending to be from somewhere they are not. The 12 rooms on this list are not the easiest to find on a tourist map, and that is the point. They are the places the city actually eats at — across the day and into the evening, six and seven days a week, in postal codes the canal-tour boats do not announce. A few are small enough that a Friday walk-in is a long wait; a few hold the kitchen open well past dinner, which is rare for the centre. None of them are chain copies of better-known global formats. They run the cuisine they say they run — Mediterranean, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, French-Dutch-international, meat-led, salad, pizza, regional, Indonesian, Japanese, Indian — and they run it for the people who live within walking distance of the front door. The list is ordered by editorial preference, not by popularity; rank one is the place we send friends first. Skip the trams to the obvious squares; book one of these instead.