It’s never really a good sign when two sets of customers walk in to a restaurant, sit down, look at the menu, then promptly turn around and walk out again. But when a place that looks like a casual trattoria sells main courses at around €25-35 (and when those prices are not on the website), it’s hardly surprising. Couple that with the startling notice on page two of the menu that guests who only order one course will be charged an extra €10 per person “to cover the expenses of laundry and couvert” [sic], and you’ve surely got a lot of walk-outs. All of which is a shame because the food at Quattro Gatti, if you can swallow the price tag with it, is actually a triumph.
Quattro Gatti, in case you hadn’t guessed from the name, is Italian. It’s a bright, cheerful little place with tiny tables for two crammed in every which way and an open kitchen at the back. The menus are those huge generic plastic-laminated things that you usually see in Indian restaurants with 100 dishes on offer. But Quattro Gatti only serves three antipasti, three primi and three secondi, plus a chilled cabinet of desserts that don’t appear on the menu at all. Swap the cumbersome plastic phonebook for a simple, hand-written sheet of paper and the restaurant would instantly look classier and more authentic. Which is what, in fact, it is.
We ordered the veal tartar to start, which came with poached egg yolks, shavings of black truffle and pecorino, and a simple salad dressed with very good olive oil. It was lucky we decided to share (despite the risk of the €10 cover charge) because it was huge.
Scary French Lady took the veal T-bone steak as a main course, which came with a rich, creamy, perfectly reduced sauce, and a stack of black rice “Venere” (sort of cheesy and sticky, but drier than risotto). While she munched her way through what must have been half a kilogram of baby bull, I got started on my lobster linguine. And when I say lobster linguine, I actually think there was more lobster than there was pasta. The sauce was sweet with ripe tomatoes and faintly aniseedy with basil. Luxury on a glass, fish-shaped plate.
When it came to dessert, we were both too full to carry on so we decided to risk the cover charge and get the bill. Lo and behold, despite ordering a starter, two main courses (one of which cost an eye-watering €35) and four glasses of wine, the extra €10 still applied. Scary French Lady did what she does best and started to look – well – scary; but a quick calculation told us that the cover charge came to around 10% of what would have been the total. So rather than argue, we paid without leaving a tip. Quattro Gatti ended up with the same amount of money, but their guests left with a bad taste in their mouths.
All this being said, I can’t give the restaurant less than four stars. The food was superb (if expensive), the house wine was dreamy, and the service was at least acceptable – which is about all you can hope for in Amsterdam. But if Quattro Gatti wants to stop seeing its customers walk out before they’ve even ordered (and those who stay, leave without tipping), it needs to drop the ridiculous cover charge, reduce its portion sizes, smarten up its image and lower its prices.
