Please note that since writing this blog post, Stout has closed down
While December always means festivities, for me there are two more celebrations: my best friends, Andrea and Helen, both have birthdays in December, so what better way to celebrate than dinner?
Monday nights in Amsterdam are a strange beast: restaurants are either full, empty or closed. And to state the bleedin’ obvious, you can’t eat in a restaurant that’s full or closed, and you don’t want to eat in a restaurant that’s empty. So after nearly an hour’s walk in the cold, we settled on Stout. I was reluctant to go in; last time I’d been there for lunch I waited 45 minutes for a sandwich that was full of mouldy avocado. But the dinner menu looked enticing, and by this point we were freezing.
Unable to choose and feeling decadent, we opted for the restaurant’s sharing platter at just under €30 plus a bottle of decent Rioja. Initially sceptical, I was pleasantly surprised. We kicked off with an amuse of tuna tartare and some prawn-cracker-esque crunchables with sweet chilli sauce. It took the edge off our appetite and left us wanting more.
Next came a tower of starters reminiscent of my afternoon tea at Yauatcha a couple of weeks ago. Atop it we found a warm pumpkin soup with single goat’s cheese ravioli (raviolo?!); a cucumber and mozzarella ‘carpaccio’, which would more accurately be described as a roulade, with tomato panna cotta; raw salmon (also in roulade format) filled with shrimps, herb mayonnaise and peppercorn cream cheese; slivers of cured deer with pumpkin seeds; and cold Thai beef with marinated noodles. All were delicate, well conceived and suitably moreish.
So-called main courses, which were similarly sized to our starters (this was no bad thing, given their multitude), comprised warm dishes only. Sole wrapped in prosciutto with bulgar wheat was moist but not watery; beef cheek with mustard sauce was pleasantly peasanty; entrecote with a rice-filled bitterbal was reminiscent of Sicilian ‘arancini’; cod came with a sauerkraut beignet; and something that tasted like zuurvlees with mash might have been rather remissly described as osso bucco. Dishes were presented in a rectangular block that conveniently held two of everything. And the service wasn’t bad either.
So now I’m left with a problem: if this were a dance-off on Strictly Come Dancing (aka Dancing with the Stars), I would put Stout through to the next round of the competition. But having seen them in training (via previous lunch experiences), I’m reluctant to be overly generous. Consistency is key in the restaurant business, because there’s no guarantee that your customers will give you a second chance if you let them down on the first.
