Places, Kept

Amsterdam

The first impression

Amsterdam is almost offensively pretty. You walk out of Centraal and it starts immediately: narrow brick houses, enormous windows, trees hanging over the water, bikes chained to anything that will hold one, bridges everywhere. Some of the houses lean enough that in another city you would call someone. Here they just make the street better.

Give the obvious Amsterdam its time. Walk the slowly. Spui is lovely; Noordermarkt is better when something is actually happening there; Museumplein gives the big institutions enough space to breathe; Dam is chaotic and useful and has the sitting right on it. Go inside the palace when it is open. Give the a proper chunk of the day. too, if you care about . depends on what is showing.

is the one that catches people off guard. It is still a normal cinema, except the normal cinema has stained glass, heavy carpet, carved wood, lamps everywhere and the sort of 1920s decoration that now looks completely insane because nobody would spend the money to build it again. Go see it even if the film is shit.

You can do all of this for a few days and have an excellent trip. The canals alone are enough to keep producing stupidly beautiful little scenes: a boat under a bridge, three crooked houses reflected in the water, somebody cycling past with flowers sticking out of the front basket, warm windows at dusk.

At water level

Then the water starts getting in the way.

You want to go somewhere and there is a canal between you and it. Then another. You start recognizing bridges, using the Amstel to orient yourself, realizing that the IJ behind Centraal is much wider than the little waterways you have been walking around all day.

is the quickest way to understand the canals without understanding anything technical about them. Rent one of the little electric boats and drive it yourself. Pick a direction. Miss the turn. Reverse awkwardly while everyone gives advice. Work out which bridges you fit under. Let the passengers open another beer. After a couple of hours at water level the canals feel less like the thing you came to photograph and more like streets you happen to be floating through.

Everyday Amsterdam

The bike finishes the job.

Amsterdam gets much smaller on one. , , , , , these names look like separate areas on a map and then somebody tells you dinner is twelve minutes away. People cycle to work, to the supermarket, to somebody’s house, to restaurants, to clubs. Good coat, bad rain, groceries, flowers, child on the front, another child on the back. Whatever needs to move gets moved.

Nobody makes a big deal out of it.

That lack of ceremony is everywhere. is beautiful and gets absolutely used. People run through it, cycle across it, lie around for hours when the weather is even vaguely decent. The canal edges fill up. Terraces fill up. Boats fill up. Amsterdam has all this absurdly precious-looking scenery and the people living in it treat it like normal public space, which is exactly why it feels alive.

runs through with fish, fruit, flowers, clothes, snacks and household stuff mixed together. There are tourists, obviously, but there are also people buying dinner. is useful when you have reached the point in a Netherlands trip where pancakes are required. is for Neapolitan pizza and wine, and does not need a larger argument than that. started with a fishmonger family and now runs a much bigger operation; when it is packed, watch how much seafood is moving through that room and how calmly the place handles it.

This is when Amsterdam starts feeling dangerously easy.

You can eat somewhere, cycle ten minutes, meet somebody else, have a beer, change the plan, go somewhere completely different. Nobody has had to book a car, regroup at the hotel or declare that the evening is entering phase two.

is in beside the De Gooyer windmill, which sounds like the setup for the most touristy beer in the Netherlands and somehow isn’t. Go have one.

is less picturesque and extremely useful: if there is a game you actually care about, go there. Big screens, beer, people shouting at football. A city guide should be able to help with that too.

in is smaller than Albert Cuyp and feels closer to the daily rhythm around it. sits right there. The founder is from Ciudad Juárez; the food is northern Mexican, and the stall makes the most sense while the market is still moving around it. Someone is waiting for tacos, someone else is buying vegetables, people are talking across the counter, music is on. Garnachas y cotorreo. Exactly.

Next door, occupies the old tram depot with , a cinema, library, studios and other things packed into those big old sheds. is useful when six people want six different dinners and nobody wants to negotiate for forty minutes.

Keep going and Amsterdam keeps refusing to become complicated. is the pizza place to know in . Get the pizza, then go back outside. The streets around it are narrow and beautiful, Noordermarkt is close, people live above the bars and restaurants, bikes are jammed into every available gap. The neighborhood has changed enormously from its old working-class version, but it still has ordinary life happening directly on top of the pretty stuff.

The whole city

The people

Somewhere around this point, the people start becoming the main event.

makes that especially obvious. It is in , and the hotel room is built around a proper four-person table with the bed lifted upstairs. That one decision changes the whole room. You can work at the table, eat there, invite someone over, leave your laptop open, spread your stuff out. Upstairs there are communal tables, coworking, food, a bar, terraces and a greenhouse.

People use all of it because they have actual reasons to be there. Someone is working. Someone is eating. Somebody recognizes a face from yesterday. A friend joins. Another chair gets pulled over. No scheduled bonding exercise. No one introducing themselves to the room.

That is very close to the thing Amsterdam does best socially.

There are a ridiculous number of extremely cool people here, and very few of them seem desperate for you to know it.

People dress well, know very specific music, work strange jobs, have friends from everywhere, disappear to play a set somewhere on Thursday and still show up at an office on Friday morning. Someone can look completely outrageous and be the least performative person at the table. Someone can work in commodities and know more about techno than you. Someone moved here for school, stayed six years and now has a friend group where nobody seems to have the same passport.

There is also very little fuss around difference. Gay, straight, Dutch, Mexican, Turkish, Surinamese, British, rich, broke, designer, waiter, trader, DJ, people get on with it. The reaction to someone being unusual is often so small it barely qualifies as a reaction.

That is where Amsterdam’s coolness really sits. Not in one club or one neighborhood. In people who are allowed to be very specific without having to spend the evening explaining the specificity.

Behind the façade

Zeedijk gives that international Amsterdam some history.

Chinese sailors started settling around the old port in the early twentieth century, and the Chinatown around , Geldersekade and grew from there. The same small area also has queer history, sex work, bars, restaurants and the remains of a much rougher port city all sitting on top of each other.

has been on since 1981. Cantonese, direct, deeply part of the street. It became famous enough in Dutch culture that Kees van Beijnum named a novel De Oesters van after it, which later became a film. That is a very good kind of restaurant fame: not a reservation frenzy, just a place becoming part of how a city talks about itself.

is a few doors away and louder immediately. Close tables, groups, food moving fast, busy outside. Go with several people.

sits elsewhere in the center, around , which has its own long LGBTQ+ history. In 1993 Sichuan became the first Chinese restaurant in the Netherlands to receive a Michelin star. Chinese food in Amsterdam was already refusing to fit neatly inside “Chinatown” decades ago.

After a while the division between Dutch Amsterdam and international Amsterdam starts looking slightly silly. is Amsterdam. is Amsterdam. is Amsterdam. full of people from everywhere is Amsterdam. The fact that all of these people and places came from somewhere else does not make the city less Dutch; it is part of what Dutch Amsterdam looks like now.

Across the IJ

Then go behind Centraal and take the ferry.

It is free, it takes a few minutes, and the change is enormous.

The IJ opens up properly. The tight canal streets disappear behind you. has bigger buildings, former industrial land, shipyard scale, newer housing and much more empty space between things. Turn around and Centraal is still right there, which makes the whole jump feel slightly ridiculous.

is up here. Get a Mannenliefde. That is the beer. The brewery has moved around over the years; the current Craft Space puts the brewery, taproom, terrace and events together.

Then .

Go before it is fully packed.

There are still tables. People are eating. Someone is skating. People are drinking outside. Music is already on. A while later there are more people standing than sitting. Later still, whatever distinction existed between restaurant, bar, skate space and night out has stopped mattering.

is one of those places where Amsterdam suddenly makes a lot of sense. Not because it proves some theory about the city. Because you are standing there watching several things happen at once and nobody seems to find the combination strange.

around it is changing quickly. Old industrial land gave places like this large, awkward, comparatively cheap space. Then people wanted to live there. New housing arrived. Land got more valuable. Those big weird spaces get harder to hold onto.

has already had to move. The old Expo-Resto is gone; the current is at Anthony Fokkerweg. On Fridays and Saturdays there is dinner, multiple club rooms, a bruine kroeg and karaoke in the same building.

That sentence is enough.

By now Amsterdam should be looking very different from the city you walked into from Centraal.

After dark

Then there is techno.

and are institutions, but the useful advice is to check the calendar. is the old church; grew out of a former milk factory. A famous building with nothing you want to hear that night is still nothing you want to hear that night.

Amsterdam’s electronic-music culture is much bigger than a list of clubs anyway. Promoters, DJs, queer communities, regulars, temporary venues, people who know exactly which night matters and people who heard about it two hours ago are all moving through the same city. And because everyone has a bike, “all the way out there” keeps turning out to mean twenty-five minutes.

is in inside the old ACTA dental-school complex. Concrete, several rooms, long nights. Look at the lineup first. If it is right, go west.

is farther out in and queer-run. Read the program and read the house rules. The music matters, but so does the crowd and how people are expected to treat one another inside. That is part of the night, not something stapled onto it.

That matters because Amsterdam nightlife has memory. Places close, people move, promoters end up elsewhere, another building starts hosting the night everybody is talking about. The map never really freezes.

The way home

And not every late night needs a warehouse.

is near Leidseplein, tiny and packed, with live jazz and very little distance between the musicians and everybody else. Go late.

At some point you end up cycling back through the center at an hour when nobody should still be awake. The canals are black, the houses are reflected in the water, the streets have gone quiet and Amsterdam is once again stupidly pretty.

You came in thinking that was the whole trick.

It really, really wasn’t.