I have a confession to make. I don’t own any ice skates. Nor have I set bladed foot on ice (natural or otherwise) since a rather fateful first date back in 1996. (I think I thought it might promote the concept of “holding hands”; why I couldn’t have taken the poor guy to the cinema and tried to score some under-age alcohol like any other self-respecting British 15-year old I have no idea.)
The talk at the office during lunch today was of skating, skating and only skating. Feeling like a fraudulent Amsterdammer, I realised I had nothing to contribute to the discussion. But I’ve come up with an excuse: the sore throat I had last week has now made its phlegmatic way to my lungs, and I have a coughing fit every time I think about getting on my bike, let alone voluntarily slide around a canal thinly veiled with something hard and slippery.
No, I can better enjoy the winter from a comfort of an armchair in front of a log fire, warming my hands with a glass of some kill-or-cure hot brandy drink. Which is exactly what I did on Saturday evening; I lived to tell the tale, although I can’t say it exactly cured me…
Mind you, it probably didn’t help that before the log fire, I was sat beside a frequently opening door in the (at best) airy factory venue that is Bierfabriek. Their concept is simple; or, at least, it would have been if anyone had bothered to explain it to us. They serve three beers on tap, each with distinctly different characteristics, so I’d venture to say there’s something most beer drinkers would like on the menu. If you’re lucky (or possibly just if you’re on a stag do), you can score a table with a beer tap in the centre so you can inebriate yourself rather quicker and without having to wait for the servers to screw up your order three times.
Still, the beer (when it came) hit the spot, and we went on to order some food. The food menu is even simpler than the drinks menu: you can have chicken or, umm, chicken. We had chicken. Given that the service hadn’t been exactly slick so far, we ordered some bread to tide us over. Despite the fact that the chicken itself comes with chips, no one seemed to think we might want to eat the bread before our main courses. It called itself “beer bread,” but I struggled to taste what made it different from any other kind, and the butter had a lacklustre margarine quality to it.
So what’s the deal with the chicken? You get a whole poussin on a board, which claims to have been roasted but tasted distinctly fried. The skin was a little over-salted for my taste, but the meat itself was good. It was served with four sauces, which didn’t come with spoons and were decidedly un-shareable between four people, plus a basket of chips. Nothing was particularly bad – it just didn’t quite make sense.
Dinner came to around €20 a head, and for that you can’t really complain. Especially given that the aforementioned hot brandy drink at the pub next door cost us just a euro less than did the chicken. But the service was confusing, to say the least, and with a concept that simple it really needn’t have been. Bierfabriek could have potential, but it’s walking on thin ice.
