Comment by eru
8 hours ago
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
8 hours ago
I love the Netherlands, and not just for their livable street design, I just wish they food weren't so bland. They make even German cuisine look adventurous in comparison.
I really wish this tired cliché would disappear, and I say this as someone who has emigrated from a country renowned for its cuisine.
Dutch supermarkets offer an impressive variety of products, and there’s no shortage of specialty or “ethnic” shops where you can find virtually any ingredient for any type of cooking. Major cities are brimming with restaurants serving world cuisines, and people with diverse dietary restrictions are well catered to, with a plethora of options available. Plus, Indonesian and Surinamese food can be considered "local" by this point (if you ignore the historical complexity of the topic) and are simply delicious.
While it’s true that the availability of cheap street food might not be as prominent, to say the food here is “bland” couldn’t be further from the truth.
you are talking about two different things here: availability vs cuisine.
it's super easy to go to albert heijn and get really tasty ingredients and cook amazing food. it's also super easy to find great restaurants that are not dutch, and get incredible food (shout out to tacolindo, in amsterdam west).
but dutch food is incredibly bland, focuses way too much in things like mashed vegetables with sausage. you can only eat so many stamppot until you are done with it.
even dutch people say that while yes, you can cook literally anything you want (my wife and i cook brazilian food literally every day), natives in general do not do that.
Food in general in the Netherlands is fine. If we're talking about Dutch cuisine, even us Dutch people complain about how terrible it is.
As a Dutch person... this is sadly not just 100% accurate, it's almost part of our culture by now, hahaha. For example, in Gerard Reve's "De Avonden" ("The Evenings", a literary classic in the Netherlands from 1947) the daily bland dinners are described like a recurring cynical joke.
Apparently World War 2 is to blame for the shift in food culture. Somehow we never recovered from that.
I think we just internalized that Dutch cuisine sucks and focus on getting good food from other cultures (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
when i moved here, people told me the greatest issue with the country was not the weather, it was the food. and i remember saying "there's no way it's that bad".
after being here for 2y, holy shit it's true. one dutch coworker said "we just eat for fuel, not for taste".
thankfully it's quite easy to buy amazing ingredients and just do really tasty home meals.
> (don't complain about our pannenkoeken or stroopwafels though, unless you're looking for a fight).
i would also say dutch bar/finger food is delicious. it's impossible not to have bitterballen while having a beer.
Right, I guess the distinction is between "Dutch cooking" and "Dutch snacks". We're not too terrible in the latter department.
(although technically bitterballen and kroketten are local variations of the croquette, which originated from France[0], so even there we can't quite claim originality, haha)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Croquette
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Surinamese is what you are looking for.
Their savory dishes aren't great (looking at you stamppot) but they do sweets well! Poffertjes, oliebollen, stroopwafels, etc.
This is true. I can recommend the Indonesian and Surinam restaurants, both are former colonies so many people from there moved to NL. Their food is much better, the Dutch like it so much that you could almost call them part of Dutch culture.
They should also improve the landscape. It's too flat. What happened to the proposal to build a mountain in the North Sea?
I admire it to an extent in that it is a part of their healthy culture. I think they take it a bit far though
But being more like the Italians or French in terms of food would mean being more like the Italians or French...
I had some decent ramen in Utrecht recently!