Ask an American what Dutch food is and you get a pause, then something about cheese. That is fair. The Netherlands never exported its cooking the way Italy or France did, and the country is genuinely relaxed about it. What it did instead was build an entire culture around eating small, salty, fried things standing up, on a bike, out of a paper cone, at four in the afternoon, with a beer.
Once you know what to order, the Netherlands is one of the easiest countries in Europe to eat well in. This guide covers what to actually eat, what it is called, what it costs, and where to find it once you get out of the tourist streets.
The Short Version
If you have one week and you want to say you ate properly, order these five things: bitterballen with a beer, patat met from a snack bar, a broodje haring from a fish stall, a slab of oud belegen gouda from a market, and rijsttafel at an Indonesian restaurant. That is the country on a plate. Everything below is detail.
Bitterballen, and the Whole Fried Snack Family
The bitterbal is the single most Dutch thing you can eat. It is a crumbed, deep-fried ball of thickened beef ragout, about the size of a walnut, served eight or twelve to a plate with a blob of hot mustard. The outside is crisp, the inside is molten. Bite it in half first and let the steam out, or you will burn the roof of your mouth. Everybody does this once.
You eat them at borrel, which is the late-afternoon drink that sits between work and dinner and is closer to a social institution than a happy hour. Walk into any brown cafe between 16:00 and 18:00 and half the tables will have a plate of them.
The same ragout in a sausage shape is a kroket. Put that in a soft white roll with mustard and you have a broodje kroket, which is a completely normal thing for a grown adult to eat for lunch on a Tuesday. The rest of the family:
- Frikandel: a skinless minced meat sausage, deep fried. Order it speciaal and it arrives split down the middle and filled with curry ketchup, mayonnaise and raw chopped onion. It is not elegant. It is very good.
- Kaassouffle: a flat pocket of melted cheese in breadcrumbs. The vegetarian gateway drug.
- Bamischijf: a fried disc of Indonesian style noodles. Makes more sense once you read the Indonesian section below.
- Vegetarische kroket: genuinely everywhere. The Netherlands is one of the easiest countries in Europe to eat meat free in, and the fake meat brand you see in American supermarkets, The Vegetarian Butcher, was founded here.
You will also see walls of little glass hatches with coins going in and hot snacks coming out. That is FEBO, and it is an automat. Locals are affectionate and slightly embarrassed about it. Go once, late, after the beer.
Patat: Dutch Fries Are Not French Fries
Thick cut, double fried, soft in the middle, served in a paper cone or tray with a mountain of mayonnaise on top. Not ketchup. The mayonnaise is fritessaus, which is lighter and slightly sweeter than the American jar, and asking for patat met gets you exactly that without further discussion.
Regional note that Dutch people will absolutely test you on: north of the rivers it is patat, south of the rivers it is friet. Say the wrong one in Maastricht and you will be corrected, kindly.
The two combinations worth knowing:
- Patatje oorlog, literally “war fries”: mayonnaise, Indonesian peanut satay sauce and raw onion, all at once. It looks like a mistake and tastes like the best decision of your trip.
- Kapsalon: fries in a foil tray, topped with shawarma, melted gouda, salad and garlic sauce, then briefly grilled. Invented in Rotterdam in 2003 by a barber and a takeaway owner, which is why it is named after a hair salon.
Herring, and How to Eat It Without Embarrassing Yourself
Dutch herring is not raw, whatever the internet tells you. It is gutted, lightly salt cured and matured, which makes it soft, mild and buttery rather than fishy. The first catch of the season, Hollandse Nieuwe, lands in June and is a genuine national event.
You get it two ways at a viskraam, the fish stall you will find on almost every market square:
- Broodje haring: chopped herring in a soft roll with raw onion and pickles. This is the beginner version and there is no shame in it.
- Hollandse nieuwe whole, held by the tail, tipped back into your mouth. This is the postcard version. Outside Amsterdam most people just eat it off the paper with a little fork, so do that and nobody blinks.
Next to the herring you will see kibbeling: chunks of battered white fish, usually cod, fried to order and served with garlic or remoulade sauce. If herring is a step too far, kibbeling is the answer and it is excellent at any market. The best of it is on the coast, in the old fishing towns like Urk and at the beach pavilions along the boulevard at Scheveningen. Our guide to beaches in the Netherlands has the rest of the coast.
Cheese: What to Actually Buy
Gouda is not a brand, it is a style, and it accounts for most of what the country makes. What matters is age, and the Dutch label it clearly:
- Jong: about four weeks. Mild, springy, what goes on the kids’ sandwiches.
- Jong belegen: two months. The everyday cheese.
- Belegen: four months. Where it starts to get interesting.
- Oud: ten months to a year. Firm, deep, salty, with crunchy protein crystals through it.
- Overjarig: two years or more. Almost caramel. Buy a small piece.
Ask for a taste. Every cheese stall in the country will hand you slivers on a knife and expects to, and the person behind the counter would genuinely rather sell you the right one than the expensive one. Also worth trying: Leidse kaas, studded with cumin seed, and a good farmhouse boerenkaas, which is made with raw milk and tastes it.
For the theatre of it, the Alkmaar cheese market runs on Friday mornings through the season and is the full guild performance with the running carriers and the stacked wheels. Gouda has its own summer market on Thursday mornings and is quieter. Either way, buy the cheese from an actual cheese shop afterwards rather than the stall aimed at the coaches.
Taking it home: hard, aged cheese travels fine, and shops will vacuum seal it for the flight if you ask. Soft cheese is the category that gets stopped, so check the current US customs rules before you buy anything creamy.
Stamppot, Snert and the Winter Half of the Menu
Half of Dutch cooking only makes sense when it is dark at five o’clock and blowing sideways. This is the half.
Stamppot is potato mashed together with a vegetable, served with a smoked sausage on top and a well of gravy in the middle. The three you will meet are boerenkool with kale, hutspot with carrot and onion, and zuurkoolstamppot with sauerkraut. It is farm food, it is enormous, and after a cold afternoon outside it is exactly right.
Erwtensoep, also called snert, is split pea soup cooked until a spoon will stand upright in it, with smoked sausage and pork through it, served with dark rye bread and streaky bacon on the side. The traditional test is the standing spoon and people do actually check. You will find it at skating rinks, Christmas markets and any cafe near a walking route between roughly November and March.
Both of these largely vanish in summer. If you visit in July and want them, look for a restaurant that advertises Hollandse pot, which is the catch all term for traditional Dutch home cooking.
Lunch Is a Sandwich, and That Is Not a Complaint
This is the biggest adjustment for American visitors. Dutch lunch is bread. Usually cold, usually simple, usually eaten in about fifteen minutes. Restaurants are quiet at midday because most of the country is eating a boterham with a slice of cheese at their desk.
What to order in a lunchroom or cafe:
- Uitsmijter: two or three fried eggs on buttered bread with ham and cheese. The name means “bouncer”, because it was traditionally the last thing you ate before being sent home.
- Tosti: a pressed ham and cheese toastie. Order it met ham en kaas. Simple, and somehow better here.
- Broodje kroket: see above. On the menu at proper restaurants, without irony.
- Twaalfuurtje: literally “little twelve o’clock”, a plate of a few small sandwiches with soup and a croquette. The full traditional version.
And the one everybody forgets: HEMA, a department store chain, sells a smoked sausage at the counter downstairs that Dutch people are irrationally loyal to. It costs a couple of euros and it is a small national ritual.
Breakfast, and the Chocolate Sprinkle Situation
Dutch breakfast is bread, again, with things on it. Cheese, ham, peanut butter, jam. And hagelslag, which is chocolate sprinkles, eaten on buttered bread, by adults, on a weekday, entirely seriously. There are whole supermarket aisles of it in milk, dark and mixed.
The related items: vlokken are chocolate flakes rather than sprinkles, and muisjes are aniseed sprinkles, pink and white or blue and white, traditionally eaten on rusks to celebrate a new baby. If someone at your hotel hands you a rusk covered in pink sprinkles, congratulations have been extended somewhere.
Hotels aimed at international guests will serve you a full buffet. Do not skip the bread table anyway.
Pancakes: Two Completely Different Things
Pannenkoeken are plate sized, thin but not crepe thin, and treated as a whole meal rather than breakfast. They come savoury with bacon and cheese, or sweet with apple and cinnamon, and every one of them gets a pour of stroop, a thick dark syrup, from a jug on the table. Pancake houses cluster near forests, zoos and anywhere families go on a Sunday.
Poffertjes are the other thing entirely: tiny, puffy, yeasted, cooked in a dimpled pan, served twenty to a plate under a slab of butter and a snowdrift of powdered sugar. Market stalls, fairs and Christmas markets. Eat them hot or not at all.
The Indonesian Table, and Why It Is Everywhere
The Netherlands ruled Indonesia for centuries, and when that ended the food stayed. It is now so embedded that satay sauce is a standard fry topping and every supermarket sells six kinds of sambal.
The set piece is rijsttafel, the rice table: rice in the middle and anywhere from ten to twenty five small dishes around it, hot and sweet and sour and coconut rich, ordered for the table and shared. It was invented by the Dutch as a way of showing off the range of Indonesian cooking at once, and it is one of the best meals in the country. Book ahead, go hungry, and expect two hours.
Also worth knowing: Surinamese food, from the former Dutch colony in South America, which gives you roti rolls and broodje pom and is cheap, generous and mostly found in the cities. If you only have one non-Dutch meal in the Netherlands, this is a real contender.
The Sweet Half
Stroopwafels, appeltaart the size of a hubcap, oliebollen at New Year, tompouce, speculaas, and the entire strange world of Dutch liquorice, which ranges from mildly sweet to aggressively salty. There is enough of it that it deserves its own guide, so we wrote one: traditional Dutch desserts worth trying.
The one rule for stroopwafels: buy them warm off the iron at a market, not shrink wrapped from a souvenir shop. It is a different food.
What to Drink
Beer is pilsner by default and it arrives in a small glass with two fingers of foam on top, which is correct and not an attempt to short you. Heineken, Amstel and Grolsch are the household names, and the Heineken Experience in Amsterdam is a museum rather than a brewery these days. The interesting beer is elsewhere: Brouwerij ‘t IJ under a windmill in Amsterdam, Jopen in a converted church in Haarlem, and La Trappe near Tilburg, which is one of the small handful of genuine Trappist breweries in the world.
Jenever is the Dutch spirit that gin descends from, maltier and softer than gin, served in a tulip glass filled to the brim so you have to bend down to the first sip. Ordered alongside a beer it is a kopstootje, a “little head butt”, and it is exactly as dangerous as it sounds.
For coffee, ask for koffie verkeerd if you want it milky, which is half coffee and half hot milk and translates as “wrong coffee”. A plain coffee usually arrives with a small biscuit on the saucer. Take the biscuit.
Where to Actually Eat
- The weekly market. Every town has one, usually one or two mornings a week, and it is where the fish stall, the cheese stall and the warm stroopwafel iron all are. This is the single best food experience in the country and it is free to walk through. Markthal in Rotterdam is the spectacular indoor version.
- Brown cafes. Dark wood, worn floors, sand on the bar in the old ones. Order a beer and bitterballen. Many serve a simple dagschotel, the dish of the day, in the evening.
- Eetcafe. A step up from a brown cafe, a step down from a restaurant, and where most Dutch people actually eat out. Mains around 18 to 25 euro.
- Snackbar or cafetaria. Fries, croquettes, frikandel, all of it. Cash still helps at the older ones.
- Pannenkoekenhuis. Usually attached to somewhere you were going anyway.
Two practical things. Dutch dinner is early: kitchens fill at 18:00 and in smaller towns they stop taking orders around 21:00, so an American 20:30 reservation habit will get you a closed kitchen. And service is included, so tipping is light and optional. We cover that properly in our guide to tipping in the Netherlands, and the wider spending question in is the Netherlands expensive for travelers.
Roughly What Things Cost
- Beer in a cafe: 3.50 to 5 euro
- Plate of eight bitterballen: 7 to 10 euro
- Patat met from a snack bar: 3.50 to 5 euro
- Broodje haring or kibbeling at a market: 4 to 7 euro
- Uitsmijter or tosti at lunch: 8 to 13 euro
- Main course in an eetcafe: 18 to 25 euro
- Rijsttafel for two: 60 to 90 euro
- Coffee: about 3.50 euro
Prices run highest in central Amsterdam and drop noticeably the moment you leave it. The same plate of bitterballen in Amersfoort or Delft costs a third less and comes with a nicer view.
Eating Your Way Around From One Base
Dutch food is regional in small, satisfying ways. The fish is best on the coast. The cheese markets are in Alkmaar and Gouda. The best Indonesian food is in the cities. Winter food is best in a village cafe with a wood stove.
The good news is that none of those are far apart. From the middle of the country you can be at the coast for kibbeling in about an hour and a quarter, at a cheese market before it opens, and back for dinner, without moving hotels. Bungalowpark ‘t Eekhoornnest in Soest sits in the woods at the edge of the Soester Dunes with a market square, a Thursday market and a good bakery ten minutes away, and the whole country inside a two hour circle. See our guide to using a central Netherlands travel base, and the Netherlands travel guide for Americans for the practical side of the trip.
