Please note that since writing this blog post, Mensjelief has closed down
“You see, the thing is: Vicky has a dilemma here…” explained one lunch-er to another as we sat outside brand-new Spaarndammerbuurt hotspot Mensjelief; “she wants to love this place. She really does – it’s in her ‘hood, she wants to support local foodie businesses, it’s a nice-looking venue – and yet here she is seething with rage about all the f*ck-ups. It’s going to be a nightmare for her to review – really.”
He hit the nail square on the head. Mensjelief is the new kid on the block – even newer than my trusty local, Cafe de Walvis. It’s just up the road, it has a sunnier terrace, and it’s got the potential to be a worthy competitor. Moreover, some of what it does is excellent: the cheese and charcuterie platters are brimming with top-quality (mostly Spanish) produce that’s good value, too. The coffee is decent, the beer selection presentable, and the bread ultra-fresh. Mensjelief shows flashes of brilliance, and then makes you want to strangle it in the next breath.
On my first visit, it was a Friday night after work and I’d intended to have dinner before heading out to de Pijp. We ordered a couple of beers and some hapjes to share. The menu offered a “kaas plankje” and a “vlees plankje”, both of which appealed, so I asked if we could have a combination of cheese and meat on one plank. You’d have thought I’d asked the waiter to bring me the platter naked. Fortunately, the kitchen was accommodating enough to meet our request, but it baffled me that no one had considered that (from the customer’s point of view) this might have been a good idea in the first place?
After polishing off the entire contents of the wooden plank (which were, admittedly, delicious, despite the fact that we had to order bread to eat with it separately – again, why not offer it to us?), we were far too full to manage main courses. So it was with some curiosity that I returned for lunch a week later, eager to check out the daytime menu. My lunch dish was one of the flashes of brilliance: a sort of cross between a croque monsieur and a tuna melt, but then with salmon.
The two dishes my lunch buddies ordered, on the other hand, gave me food rage. One asked for an exciting-sounding salad involving figs and salami, but was told that the French beans had run out. Not to worry, she told the waitress, who offered to bring the rest with some more green salad instead of the beans. What arrived was a small bowl of lettuce with some pickled gherkins, onions and peppers in, dressed in so much salt and pepper “it was crunchy,” I quote its victim. The promised bread that was supposed to accompany it never came, despite our asking for it twice. Realising the salad was nothing like what was advertised on the menu (absence of green beans notwithstanding), my friend sent it back. The waitress explained that there had been a misunderstanding in the kitchen but didn’t offer a solution, so my friend switched her order to the same as mine.
Meanwhile, my boyfriend chose the BLT. Admittedly, he has a bit of an issue when it comes to open sandwiches, and as a general rule doesn’t order sandwiches that cost over €4 on the basis that “the more they cost, the less they seem to function like an actual sandwich”. But to be fair, he has a point: what arrived was completely inedible. A thin slice of bread on a board was topped with salad and bacon that slid off every time you got your knife or your mouth anywhere near it. He asked for another slice of bread to put on top so that he could eat the damned thing. Twenty minutes later, he was still waiting.
Finally, the bread that we’d ordered to go with my friend’s now-sent-back salad arrived, so we made the best of a bad situation and plonked that on top of the open BLT. Much of the filling still got lost in the eating, but it was a minor improvement.
When one of the staff came over to ask us how our lunch was, I nearly choked with indignation. My boyfriend tried to tell them about his issues with the sandwich and was told “this is how we serve it”. Meanwhile, my friend politely pointed out the so-salty-it-was-crunchy salad dressing and was corrected that “this is how we make salad dressing in Holland”. She and I have both lived here nearly seven years. I was ready to explode.
Unable to gather my thoughts quickly enough to list all the mistakes they had made, I did what I always do and consoled myself that soon I’d be voicing my rage in a far more public place. But that didn’t help the fact that I’d rather not have to voice it at all. “Mens je lief” translates literally as people you love, but right now I am struggling even to like them. A little common sense would go a long way – that, and remembering the customer is supposed to be right.
