I’ve just returned from a week of three multi-course meals a day, prefaced and prologued by copious amounts of drinking, and interspersed with as much skiing as my sleep-deprived, hungover, aching limbs could tolerate. In short, it was more or less my perfect holiday.
But my brain seems to have atrophied somewhat as a result. I went out to the recently opened Sowieso for dinner the night before I left for the Alps, and can now barely recall what I ate. All I remember is that it was surprisingly good. Surprisingly, in that the décor looked like a cross between a cabaret show’s green room and something that Laurence Llewelyn-Bowen would have produced in Changing Rooms circa 1997. Tacky Marilyn Monroe prints sat atop stacked black storage boxes, while the lighting ensured that the bar spectacularly failed to achieve its goal as focal point in the middle of the restaurant.
Still, I’m a food critic not an interior designer, so we’ll move on. To make matters (like my memory) simpler, my dining buddy and I both ate the same thing. We started with a raw tuna number with some kind of salad-y thing and a wasabi-mayo dressing. All were fresh, zingy, present and correct.
We then moved on to a ‘sucade’ steak with sage butter and ratatouille. I’m not entirely sure what cut of beef a sucade is, but it tasted much like rib-eye only without the bone. It was perfectly seasoned and served medium-rare (not that we got a choice) and was one of the tastiest bits of meat I’ve eaten lately in Amsterdam. I had new potatoes with mine, which were small and sweet and covered in butter. The ratatouille wasn’t bad either.
We were entirely stuffed at this point, but spent such a long time umm-ing and ahh-ing about what to do next that we eventually realised we had room for dessert after all. Gosh, what a surprise. I ordered the crème brulee, possibly sub-consciously as a bit of test because I think I know a thing or two about crème brulees. I’m pleased to report that Sowieso passed with flying colours.
I’ve never been quite sure what ‘sowieso’ means, incidentally; I get it in other people’s sentences, but I’ve never been quite confident enough to use it in my own. Google translates it as ‘anyway’, which is a word I use all the time in English, so I guess I should get more comfortable with it. At €50 each including wine (which, needless to say, I remember nothing about), I’m pretty sure I’ll be back at Sowieso sowieso.
