All posts tagged: Restaurants

Hertog Jan

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1st Visit: Lunch Saturday 16th 2017 (19.25/ 20) Elegant and precise cooking with a real sense of place, set in a beautifully calm, light and informal dining room, though slightly let down by an oddly under par service. Food-wise it was one of the best meals we’ve eaten all year (and ever), but still I’m left with the distinct impression we’ve only scratched the surface of what delights can be found here. We can not wait to return.  (Click on the score to see the rating system and why I write these reviews!) €€€€€ 6 course lunch €195 3 Michelin stars since 2011 Gault&Millau 19/20 OAD Best European Restaurants No. 25 Worlds 50 Best No. 61 Hertog Jan has been high on my restaurant wish list for longer than I care to remember. Widely recognised as one of the better restaurants in Europe, probably at the forefront of innovative fine dining coming out of Belgium, and one of only three 3 star Michelin establishments in the country, this place is ‘worth a special trip’ in the truest sense. …

Vermeer

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(17/20)  Thoughtful dishes full of flavour, with a heavy focus on vegetables, presented in a calm and well proportioned dining room. This is a little oasis of fine dining right in the middle of one of the most raucous parts of central Amsterdam, and on this performance certainly in the top few of the one star restaurants in the city. 

BREDA

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(16.25 / 20) A non-Michelin fine dining spot that really works. This is an excellent restaurant with an elegant bistro setting, serving up delicious, deceptively simple food which can often go toe-to-toe with (some of) the 1 stars in town. And all that at a very sensible price point.

Martin Beratasegui

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Loidi Kalea, 4 – 20160 Lasarte-Oria (Gipuzkoa) Tel. (+34) 943 366 471 info@martinberasategui.com 3 Michelin stars since 2001 29th best Restaurant in the world – Restaurant magazine 2008/11 1st Visit: Lunch Saturday 12th November 2016 (17.5/20) Slightly under-par performance from one of the world’s great chefs €€€€€ In the unremarkable town of Lasarte-Oria, about half an hour outside of San Sebastian, deep in Basque Country between northern Spain and France, stands the flagship and eponymous restaurant of one of the giants of modern Spanish cuisine. Once dubbed ‘the most famous chef you’ve never heard of’, Beratasegui may not be as well known as others internationally, but enjoys a status similar to Ferran Adria in his native Spain, where he quietly has built up a mini empire of fine dining. He currently holds 7 Michelin stars. The accolades started early in his career when, having returned to run his family’s restaurant after training to be a Pastry chef in France, he achieved his first macaron at the fresh age of 25. And whilst the doyen of modernist Spanish food …

Vinkeles

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Keizersgracht 384 1016 GB Amsterdam Tel +31(0)20 530 2010 1 Michelin star since 2009 Gault&Millau 18 7th Visit:  2nd Dinner at the Chef’s Table : Saturday 4th March 2017 (17.5/20)  €€€€€ You can eat pretty well in my adopted town of Amsterdam… which is fortunate given eating is one of the few things I really excel at. Leaving your home to live somewhere new is never easy, and when food is as important to you as it is to me, leaving a city which has as world-class a food scene as London can be verging on terrifying. But I landed firmly on two feet here all those years ago; Amsterdam definitely knows how to eat well. I’ve actually been coming to The Dylan hotel for much longer than the 6 years I’ve been frequenting its flagship restaurant, given I often stayed here when I was in town on business travel. When we got married at the Museum van Loon a few blocks down the same canal, we spent our wedding night at The Dylan. So it’s …

Izakaya

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(14/20) Overly extensive menu promises a lot and (expensively) delivers much less.

Seated in a boutique hotel towards the lower end of the once-painfully-hip-now-painfully-expensive Amsterdam neighbourhood of the Pijp, Izakaya serves up small plates of Japanese/South American fusion to tourists and (wealthy) locals, alongside cocktails and live DJs.