For reasons I can only put down to commitment phobia, I never seem to have boyfriends who live in Amsterdam. I also get a lot of visitors. Not surprisingly, then, I seem to do my fair share of picking people up from the train station. And any man who’s travelled to see yours truly is probably in need of a beer. In fact, any woman who’s travelled to see me is probably in need of a beer, too. Which is why Cafe Kobalt has become a bit of a local to me: it’s sufficiently close to Amsterdam Centraal to be an easy meeting place for non-Amsterdammers, and yet somehow just off the beaten track of the stream of tourists pouring out of its sliding doors.
I’ve been to Kobalt a dozen times or more, but because I think of it as somewhere to grab a quick beer between other plans, I seem to have overlooked the fact that I’ve actually now eaten there several times. After all, whatever a Friday night has in store, a girl needs sustenance, right?
So far, I’ve worked my way through the chicken satay with prawn crackers and chips; various tapas; the club sandwich; and, most recently, guinea fowl wrapped in pancetta with a lentil-vege number. Haute cuisine it is not, but the menu has got consistently better during the years that I’ve been a patron. The eetcafe staples are your best bet, and the tapas make good date food if you’re not sure beforehand how long you want to linger. Plus, they serve IJbier, which is something that every visitor from out of town should taste.