Butcher shop de Beurs, Amstelstraat 9, Amsterdam
Digit: 8.5
Starters around €13, main around €25, after €11, five course menu €57.50. Mon, Tues, Wed closed. Also very suitable for vegetarians.
My table mate has just taken the first bite of her dahl pie: split lentils with celeriac in a fantastic puff pastry coat; spicy, spicy, buttery, flaky and hearty like a very good sausage roll. Then she puts down her fork, closes her eyes, and sighs: ‘Ah, my dear. I finally feel like I’m alive again.’
It’s Saturday night and the whole thing, nay, the whole city seems to be in that same exuberant liberation mood. And Slagerij de Beurs, the restaurant where we sit, does indeed have all kinds of things in house that we often missed so terribly during the gray mush of winter. The great pleasure of eating something fantastic that you certainly couldn’t make yourself. Nice waiters with good ideas who, winking conspiratorially, put just the right thing in your glass. Listening with red ears to an adjacent table that first becomes more and more cheerful, then starts to sulk and then gets into a screaming fight – the complete, three-dimensional restaurant experience.
The big, raging business is in the hands of two men with the resounding names Ard Muntjewerf and Timo de Beurs – it could have been a dreaded villain duo of Willy Vandersteen. Timo is a chef from a butcher’s family, Ard was previously the boss at The Lobby, the two large and successful restaurants of Hotel V. Like the rest of the brigade, they combine Amsterdam joviality and looseness with a kind of slightly obsessive geekiness, a feverish urge for care in wine and food. Chef De Beurs expresses himself in a predilection for complicated, classic dough and charcuterie dishes. He gained some fame for his excellent, but laborious homemade frikandels and then with an even more elaborate giant frikandel bun, the frikandelington – you could imagine that in his spare time he crafts boats in bottles or model trains† Muntjewerf and his two sommeliers hold sway with great flamboyance over an exquisite, characterful range of wine and other drinks. The solid list of champagnes is divided by area, the Loire wines by grape; that may seem insignificant, but you recognize the true nerds by those kinds of things. Throughout the evening we see a whole battery of wine people from other Amsterdam catering establishments queuing for a collegiate glass at the long bar.
NS canteen
The decor of the restaurant is a mystery to me. Slagerij de Beurs is located on a scruffy corner at spitting distance from Rembrandtplein (the French brasserie chain Flo used to be home here) and despite its size, it looks squat because of the low ceiling – they can’t help that either. But the banana-yellow interior with train benches, roller blinds, and a kind of disused reading tables looks more like a generic NS canteen or station restaurant in 1995 than the characterful and bustling catering establishment it really is. However, the yellow chairs are comfortable, and on the menu we immediately see plenty of appealing things that make us feel good: oysters; jambon persille with eel; Chicory with hollandaise, gruyere and bacon, tail with bearnaise sauce and a list of tempting pies. Despite the name of the place, we also see attractive vegetarian dishes, such as ‘brioche and butter pudding’ with leeks and Roquefort sauce, and there is a weekly changing five-course menu that can also be done without meat.
After an aperitif with tasty pickled artichokes (€ 4.50) we share a portion of excellent pâté en croûte (€ 13.50). The tender, pink pork with pistachio and apricot is surrounded by a layer of clear jelly and a crust. I often don’t like the dough that gives pâté en croûte its name and prefer to just eat a piece of good bread – even at chic French butchers, the crust has become soggy and greasy more often than not. Here it is a true piece of art, as tasty as it is crispy. Sommelier Midas van der Meiden, who, like Muntjewerf, we know from The Lobby, adds a lush, slightly tropical, very slightly bitter white burgundy (André Bonhomme Viré-Clessé, ‘Les Prêtres de Quintaine’ 2019) that turns out extremely fortunate with the mild, sweet, savory, nutty pâté. Hoera! An equally festive combination is the salty chenin blanc from Anjou (Thibaud Boudignon à François(e)’ 2018) with pommes duchesse with caviar and oyster cream (€ 20), beautiful, crispy towers of mashed potatoes with a luxurious saltiness in every nook and cranny, super refined without one ingredient too many.
A ballotine is usually a boned poultry thigh, filled with a farce and covered with the skin. De Beurs made one with a chic French Bresse chicken (€28) and put just about everything in it: the heart, the comb, the livers, the meat and the skin. The carcass goes into the fantastic gravy. The result is a dish in which the wonderful multitude of separate, but related flavors and crackles that a whole chicken has in it come together: very ingenious and incredibly tasty. The garnish: bitter broccoli leaf and a nice potato leek gratin.
Pie
In addition to the aforementioned split lentil pie (€18, with an Indian-style sauce with coconut cream), an equally fantastic English fish pie (€22.50) is served in the same pithivier-like dome shape. As it should be, it is made with a mixture of fresh and smoked fish (in this case haddock and monkfish) in a creamy bechamel. In England you usually eat it under the roof of mashed potatoes, but De Beurs also gives this pie a crust of dough and a layer of brandade (mashed potatoes with stockfish) on the inside – it works fantastically, like a snowball of fishiness and irresistible carbohydrates. We are accompanied by a fresh remoulade of celeriac with tarragon and a suitably smoky-savory South Chilean wine from the país grape (Roberto Henriquez, ‘Santa Cruz de Coya’ 2020). Then there is also tame pigeon (€ 28): juicy, scarlet breast meat next to a stew in which, in addition to the legs, the entrails have also been processed.
For dessert we choose the French classic Îles flottantes (€11). These ‘floating islands’ or foam eggs are traditionally milk-poached quenelles of whipped egg whites, served over crème anglaise. At De Beurs, it’s caramelised Italian meringue (which is chewier and sweeter), with a salted honey chatter, maple syrup ice cream and a chocolate tuile – all skillfully made and also quite tasty (although: sweet) but very far from the original.
Slagerij de Beurs is a restaurant that is as festive as it is meticulous: a real place to feel completely human again.
Pate, pie, pie?
Pasties are fillings, conveniently held together by a crust of dough – such a good and logical idea that there are thousands of varieties and derivatives of them. English pies and pasties, in particular, come in many forms, from the fish and steak-and-ale pie with running filling, to the pork pie, which is more like French pate en croûte. The Cornish pasty is a kind of handy dough bread bin with a complete meal in it; miners with dirty hands just threw the rim, the handle, away. In principle, a pâté always had a crust of dough, unless it was made in a clay pot with a lid, the terrine. American pies are usually sweet (‘as American as apple pie‘) although a pizza, for example, also becomes one pie mentioned.
In England, the pies have never completely disappeared, but in recent years there has been a reappraisal of artisanal ones. Important in this was the chef Calum Franklin who started a ‘Pie Room’ in his restaurant. His excellent recipe book, full of spectacular old-fashioned and modern pies, bears the same name.