Pastini: you’ve been Foodied

This is the first weekend in over a month that I’m home alone in Amsterdam – no trips, no visitors, just me and my city. It’s refreshing. And it’s also time to catch up with all the people I’ve been neglecting these past few weeks.

A night out with my friend James is like walking into a little haven of glamour, nibbling on a thin slice of fabulousness… just for the few hours it lasts. We met in Pastini, an Italian restaurant round the corner from my office which – somehow – I’d never noticed. On this occasion, we didn’t order champagne (he tells me he’s destitute, though I don’t think he knows quite what that means…) but went for a bottle of the house red instead: a very drinkable Venetian merlot.

Antipasti came in multiples of three, so I had a goat’s cheese and beetroot salad (too much balsamic), prawns in a spicy sambuca cream sauce (very bread-moppable), and foie gras and prune confit on toast. ‘Darling, there’s a hair in my foie gras!’ exclaims James, as only he can…

My primo was a herb risotto with lamb meatballs. My overall impression was one of stodge. I had hopes that the herbs would offer a freshness to counterbalance the starchy rice, but they were ground to a green paste that made the rice look vegetal but didn’t add much to the texture of the dish. The meatballs seemed Sicilian in origin with sultanas and pine nuts and a lot more stodge. Finishing my plate would’ve meant entering a sofa-bound coma, and there was more fabulousness to be had later so I didn’t.

The bill came to around €35 each, and I implemented my new tactic of swapping Pastini’s business card for mine on the plate the receipt came on. Given that I’m supposed to be an anonymous, independent restaurant critic, I’m not quite sure why I’m doing this – but still, I guess it doesn’t matter if they know they’ve been Foodied when it’s already too late.

The rest of the night involved drinking expensive red wine from a decanter in James’s canal-side bachelor pad, followed by mojitos and cosmopolitans at the too-cool-for-school Jet Lounge. Sadly, this morning’s hangover was a little less glamorous.