Please note that since writing this blog post, Janvier has closed down
Yes, it’s like London Fashion Week but for foodies. How good is that. And I was lucky enough to get first dibs on the participating restaurants because one of my colleagues has a credit card (ABN amro won’t give me one – perhaps my penchant for fois gras is adversely affecting my credit rating), one of the perks of which is early access to the Restaurant Week website. The deal is this: €25 for three courses at one of over 100 restaurants in Amsterdam. For obvious reasons, you want to choose one of the ordinarily most expensive restaurants on the list. With this in mind, I plumped for Janvier, idyllically set on the Amstelveld by the seven-bridged Reguliersgracht in what always looks to me like a cricket pavilion. It isn’t, of course; it’s a restaurant on one side and a kind of modern church on the other, which lends the venue a promising romanticism.
On the table when we arrived sat a black marble slab with two small glasses of delicious olives and what looked like a cherry growing out of a piece of cake. It turned out to be a fresh caper encased in a faintly sweet grainy-textured sponge, for what of a better description. It could have been some mixture of polenta and almond, but to be honest I was neither sure what I was eating, nor entirely convinced that I liked it. Next came the real amuse bouche (so much for three courses): slim glasses of hot pumpkin soup with a goat’s cheese ‘head’, a good combination. Served on the this-time white marble slab together with the soup, came sweet bitterballen dipped in a ginger marmalade. I had much the same reaction as I’d had to the caper-cake.
Next came the starter, not in a glass this time but on a rectangular plate. Rectangular plates and small slim glasses were, I noticed, a recurring presentational feature. Said plate contained no less than five individual flavours: a piece of mackerel fillet which wasn’t entirely smoked and thus tasted something like Dutch sushi; mackerel mousse; fennel mousse; green apple foam (I’m told foam is very last year in London these days); and a tartare of sea bass. On reflection, each component of the fishy selection did indeed work with each other component, though this perhaps wasn’t immediately obvious from the linear presentation. Incidentally, we had also opted for the wine offer, which meant that each course came with its own specially selected glass of wine. The starter came with an Italian pinot grigio, of which I’m not usually very fond, but this was not only extremely palatable, it also worked with the fish.
