I suspect that Eugene's main motivation for organising the Amsterdam trip was to get Indonesian food rather than all the exciting things the city has to offer. Eugene is from Singapore, and has been spoilt throughout his upbringing in terms of food, and unfortunately the Singaporean/Malaysian/Indonesian food in London just simply sucks. I'm no connoiseur to be honest, I've never actually been in that part of the world, but I started to see what he meant.
The place that every guide book seemed to point us to was the very un-Indonesian sounding Kantjil & De Tijger, which is on Spuistraat (pronounced 'spau-straat'), a street which we kept finding ourselves at quite near the studenty city centre district. It looks completely un-Indonesian outside too, but step inside and you suddenly are hit with some wonderful smells.
The menu itself is a bit mad, mainly because if you don't speak any Indo, you spend most of the time trying to decipher what things are, especially as most dishes comprises of 4 or 5 different things, none of them written in English or Dutch! Anyway, I plumped for a nasi goreng Kantjil, which I guess translates to their house special fried rice (hee hee):
It was blooming enormous! Several of us ordered this dish, most of us struggled to eat half of it, Eugene unsurprisingly scoffed all of his down. I was a bit put off by the very greasy looking home-made crisps, but I really like that coconutty-powdery stuff they serve with everything.
Still, it wasn't quite as enormous as what Fil and Emily plumped for, which was some sort of set menu which probably would've fed all 7 of us:
All very comforting, but I must say I'm not that bowled over by it. I guess this is the kind of thing people grow up with and it becomes their comfort food for choice, just like how lots of people don't understand the random cravings I have whenever I'm in Hong Kong. I shall end on one non-foodie tip. On our first day, we did a free walking tour of the city hosted by New Europe Tours (their website here). They run these free tours all over Europe, and are generally done by enthusiastic studenty types who live on tips. The guide we had probably made up half the stuff he told us (this American kid who had a big big chip on his shoulder about his religious parents), but it was all very entertaining and a lovely way to orient yourself around the city. I'm thinking of going on one of the London ones this summer, it might be fun just to see.
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