Please note that since writing this blog post, Anna has closed down
Anna is one of those restaurants that became seemingly impossible to book a table at within a fortnight of its opening. Which I find odd because – in this triple-dip recession we’re constantly being told we’re in – there are other restaurants that I rate highly that close after a year through lack of custom. Was Anna really all the “It Crowd” had cracked it up to be? I took Mr and Mrs Foodie (aka my parents) to find out…
The first thing that struck me was the lack of windows. Anna is a military-green corridor of a restaurant stretching from the seedy Warmoesstraat to the seedier Oudekerksplein. It doesn’t have the gezellig factor that so many other places in Amsterdam do – but then again perhaps that’s what makes it unique to its too-cool-for-school fans.
The menu was a collection of dishes that all sounded 90% great, but none of which 100% spoke to me. It was punctuated by nice little “amuse bouches” that kept us all going whilst waiting for the infinitely slow main course. The service, like the menu, was 90% good: polite and attentive, yet at every course the dishes got somehow mixed up and the wrong parent ended up with the wrong dish.
My starter was made up of a great many expensive ingredients (lobster claw, Dutch shrimps, veal tartare) which were well executed but somehow lacked a certain foodie factor. I opted for the special of “Baambrugs Big” pork chop for main, which (when it finally arrived) was delicious and came with variously textured veges. Very uncharacteristically, my favourite course by far was dessert: a cherry-chocolate parcel of not-too-sweet goodness, surrounded by a moat of boozey sabayon. Grown-up indulgence.
When I asked the Honey Badger what he thought of Anna the next day, the word he chose was “lacklustre”. I knew what he meant. There was nothing technically wrong with anything we ate – it was executed beautifully. But there was something missing – some soul, some character, some passion perhaps. That’s the thing about Anna: it’s all hype and no humanity.
