Please note that since writing this blog post, Azur Bleu has closed down
Last Thursday, my friend Andrea celebrated her ten-year anniversary in Amsterdam. I met Andrea in our first week at the Universiteit van Amsterdam, in September 2001. We’ve been friends for a decade and, during that time, I spent three miserable years in the UK, whereas she made the decision not to return to her native Spain. A wise woman.
To mark the occasion, we decided to check out a Spanish restaurant that opened only just over a week ago on the Hugo de Grootplein. Spain meets Amsterdam – it seemed fitting. The menu looked promising: interesting tapas, a decent wine list, a chef who’d come from the French Cafe…
Seeing as we were a group of six, we ordered a bit of everything on the tapas menu to share, and to test out what the kitchen had on offer. That entailed marinated sardines, crisp breads doused in tomato and basil, artichoke hearts, a plate of jamon Iberico, lightly battered and fried calamari, an oddly mushy steak tartar, something called a McFoie Burger (better than it sounds), something else called a bikini (which was actually a toastie), and the most pretentious version of patatas bravas I’d ever eaten.
Dessert: chcolate, oilve oil, fleur de sel
With the exception of the patatas bravas, everything tasted pretty good. But it just wasn’t really tapas. Most of the dishes would have been better served as starters on the regular A la Carte menu, or stripped of all their fussy cheffiness and brought back the basics. The aforementioned potatoes (which came in three, six or nine pieces) were perfectly cylindrical, perfectly spaced on a perfectly rectangular plate, and topped with a perfect disc of aioli, dotted with finely chopped chives. And here’s another thing: what was with all the plates? I’ve never seen so much cash thrown at crockery for so little purpose. I would be willing to bet money on the fact that every dish was served on a unique piece of porcelain. Either the chef or the manager or both seem to be afflicted with some kind of OCD.
Not so the hapless waitresses, where the opposite applied. I’m not sure how many times we had to ask for water during the evening, until two different types turned up at once. I did that kind of weird arm gesture where I reached out for my wine glass to taste the Rueda, only to realise that the waitress was already going ahead and pouring a whole glass of it. Our first choice of wine then ran out, so we moved onto a second; at this point, we were given a bit of attitude about the fact that we didn’t want our glasses topped up with a different type of wine to the first. And that was just the drinks. The food was slow, to the point where we forgot we’d even ordered the last two dishes to appear. Plus, despite the restaurant’s love of chinaware, we had to ask for small individual plates so that we were actually able to share the tapas without spilling it all over the table.
To be fair, by the time we left (at gone midnight), one of our waitresses had apologised to us and explained they were having a few teething troubles in their first week. But the fun (if rather harsh) thing about restaurants that make every mistake in the book is that you get to play a little game in which you and your friends fantasize about how great if would be if you had your own restaurant, in which so-and-so would be in charge of front of house, someone else of décor, another of the kitchen, and so on. This resulted in a discussion about the respective environmental friendliness of the various types of hand-drying methods in restaurant bathrooms, to which one friend’s solution was: “I know, in our restaurant, we’ll have a young athletic boy to blow customers’ hands dry.” Well, quite.
Forty odd euros, a few desserts and much merriment later, we’d kind of got over the shoddy service (this is Amsterdam) and decided that Azur Bleu might be worth a revisit in a few months. My dessert involved chocolate and olive oil and salted pistachios, which both restored my faith in the chef and persuaded me to try the A la Carte menu next time.
Until then, to Amsterdam and to Andrea: here’s to another ten years!
