New Draver

Really enjoyed the chicken and amazing homemade sambals.
Big recommendation as well for the Pom.

Rudd Gullit has been known to frequent this place, and there’s a bronze-​coloured bust of him in the front part of the restaurant to prove his connection to this place. Rumour is that he might even own the joint but I don’t mind.
The place is about Surinaam food, not the mildly toxic Chinese-​style sort of grub found everywhere in Amsterdam, but more the original South American sort of cooking — basically, the real stuff.
It’s not a big restaurant, and the wines are rather naff but the food is really quite tolerable and very cheap for Amsterdam. For less than 30 Euro, the two of us had beers, a huge soup, followed by a large plate of herbed chicken in some sort of Surinaam curry sauce and rice. The taste is rather different, mainly because they replaced potatoes with cassava and they also used some herbs which I can’t quite place. Overall, it was a good dinner and the only downside is their rather liberal use of monosodium glutamate to season up their dishes, a habit also rather too common with other non-​European kitchens in this town.
The ambience isn’t too fancy, just a simple restaurant which has (polite) children running about the old tables and chairs, with nice friendly service and the added thrill of the chance to bump into Rudd himself one day.