Best Dutch Restaurants Around the World

The best-scored dutch place in each of 5 cities.

Regional variations

Holland (Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague)

Urban Dutch with the strongest Indonesian and Surinamese influence. Herring stalls, street kroketten, modern bistros, and the rijsttafel tradition all concentrate here. Rotterdam adds a Caribbean and West African layer through Suriname-Dutch cooking.

Friesland and the north

Heavier farmhouse cooking, sugar bread (suikerbrood), Frisian dry sausage (drûge woarst), and the deep cheese tradition (Friese nagelkaas, spiced with cloves). Cold-weather stamppot variants dominate.

Limburg and the south

Closer to Belgian and German cooking. Zuurvlees (sweet-sour beef braise, Limburg's answer to carbonnade), vlaai (fruit-topped tart), and a stronger Catholic culinary calendar with carnival foods like nonnevotten (sugared fried dough).

Defining dutch dishes

Haring

Cold-cured Atlantic herring, served whole or chopped, with raw onion and pickles, eaten standing up at a street kiosk by holding the tail and tipping the fish into the mouth. The seasonal Hollandse Nieuwe (new herring) lands in May or June.

Bitterballen

Deep-fried crispy spheres of thick beef ragout, served with mustard. The universal Dutch bar snack, ordered in portions of six or eight with beer.

Kroket

Larger, longer cousin of bitterballen, often eaten in a soft bun (broodje kroket) as a quick lunch. Available from automat-style hot windows (FEBO) across Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Stamppot

Potato mashed with vegetable (boerenkool with kale, hutspot with carrot and onion, andijviestamppot with endive), served with a smoked sausage (rookworst) and a well of gravy.

Erwtensoep

Thick split-pea soup with smoked sausage and pork belly, served in winter. Tradition holds that a spoon should stand upright in a proper erwtensoep.

Poffertjes

Small, fluffy yeast-and-buckwheat pancakes, cooked in a dimpled iron pan and served with powdered sugar and butter. The fairground and winter-market staple.

Stroopwafel

Two thin waffle wafers sandwiching a caramel syrup filling. Best eaten warm over a hot coffee, which softens the syrup.

Pannenkoeken

Large thin pancakes, eaten as a meal rather than a breakfast. Savory versions with bacon, cheese, and apple; sweet versions with syrup, jam, or stewed fruit.

Rijsttafel

Indonesian-Dutch banquet of 15 to 30 small dishes (sate, rendang, sambal, sayur, kroepoek) around a central plate of rice. A colonial invention that Indonesia itself does not eat in this form, but the Dutch eat it constantly.

Appeltaart

Tall, lattice-topped apple cake with raisins, cinnamon, and almond paste, baked in a deep springform pan. Served with whipped cream alongside a coffee.

How to order

At a herring stall, ask for haring with uitjes (onions) and zuur (pickle). You can have it as a sandwich (broodje haring) or whole on a paper plate with toothpicks. At a brown café (the traditional Dutch pub), bitterballen are the standard order with beer; ask for portie bitterballen and a Heineken or Amstel. At a FEBO automaat, the snacks live behind little glass doors; insert coins to release. At a sit-down restaurant, lunch and dinner menus are usually short and ordered by main; sides come on the plate. Bills are split casually (the Dutch invented going Dutch); tipping is included, with a round-up of one to two euros for good service. The rookie mistakes are asking for a large entrée at lunch (the Dutch eat cold sandwiches midday), expecting tap water (you have to specify; bottled is the default), and treating Indonesian food at an Indisch restaurant as the same as authentic Indonesian (the recipes have drifted).

What to drink with it

Beer is the most common pair. Heineken, Amstel, Bavaria, and Grolsch are the mass-market lagers; craft is widening fast, with Brouwerij 't IJ and Oedipus from Amsterdam leading. Genever (jonge or oude) is the traditional Dutch spirit, predating English gin by two centuries, drunk neat in a tulip glass from the rim without lifting (kopstootje, with a beer chaser). Dutch wine is minor; Indonesian-Dutch food often pairs with off-dry German Riesling. With coffee and dessert, Dutch coffee is filter or espresso-based; appeltaart with slagroom is the classic afternoon snack.

Where to eat it

Amsterdam concentrates the full range: from herring stalls (Stubbe's Haring, Frens Haringhandel) to FEBO automats to high-end Indonesian (Sampurna, Tempo Doeloe, Blauw) to modern Dutch tasting menus. Rotterdam adds a stronger Surinamese-Dutch scene. The Hague has the densest Indisch restaurant cluster (the colonial-return community settled there). For traditional rural Dutch cooking, head to Friesland, Drenthe, or Zeeland. Outside the Netherlands, Dutch food rarely travels except as cheese; Indonesian-Dutch is more common in former colonial cities (Jakarta carries an interesting reverse-import scene).

A short history

Dutch cuisine took its modern shape during the Golden Age (17th century), when global trade brought spices, sugar, and coffee into a national diet that had been austere and Calvinist. The Indonesian colonial inheritance arrived in waves from the 17th century through 1949, codified into Dutch home cooking by the 'Indische Nederlanders' who repatriated after Indonesian independence. Stroopwafel and frikandel are 20th-century inventions; herring and cheese are medieval.

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