Restaurant Blue Pepper

Today was our 8 weekly hairdresser appointment. Ever since I left Nike two years ago, F and I who used to work together for a couple of years, kept up the good habit of going to the hairdresser in Amsterdam together. Recently we have added a dinner to that routine as well.

We used to make an appointment on the saturdays and then went for lunch at Wagamama; you gotta love the edamama… Soooo good!! Anyone has an idea on how to make them yourself? They can’t be that hard to make right?

But since we have changed the day of the appointment to the friday we now have it followed with a dinner in a nice restaurant that we pick either by hearing about it or getting a recommendation from someone else. Today we went to the restaurant Blue Pepper on the Nassaukade 366 in Amsterdam. We both had checked the website out beforehand and while F. is not so much into Indonesian cuisine we agreed to go there as the website looked very promising.

The chef here is Sonja Perreira, who is reputedly very good.

Upon entering we were struck by the fact that the restaurant was quite a bit smaller then a look on the website would have made us guess. Really only a few tables and at 18.45 it was quite empty with only one other table full at that moment.

We were greeted very friendly and were seated at very comfortable chairs. We received one dumpling as a starter which was lovely. I chose a red housewine which was also very good and F. chose the white housewine.

We picked a ricetable to have as our meal and the biggest version you can have of that is consisting of 25 (!) different dishes. That just seemed waaaay to much, so we went for the smallest ricetable which was a total of ?40,-. Our starter was a lovely pumpkinsoup which was very spicy but in a good way. I can’t really describe it but since I find most pumpkin soups on the too sweet side this was really really good. Next was a delicious small portion of chicken satay to be followed by the ‘main’ course which was chicken with lemon grass, rice, steamed vegetables and beef. All small dishes were perfect. Great flavour, although the beef was maybe slightly too chewy. Dessert was fried banana with a small ball of coconut ice and some fruit.

Overall the food was certainly very good, but the one complaint we both had was the speed with which everything was served. While I understand that it is logical that something takes longer if you’re with many people, I don’t think that having only two tables would have to mean that you keep feeding the remaining two tables in lighting speed. That really could and should have been much slower. We hardly swallowed one course or the next was there already. But ok, that was really the only complaint and my guess is that it would have something to do with the fact that it was so quiet. Which is a bit strange given the fact that it was afterall a friday night. Shouldn’t that be the most busy night of the week? Possibly with the whole economic crisis this restaurant is too expensive to survive in the current climate. While certainly worth the 40 euro’s a lot of people might not think the same way or might not be able to spare the money.

Restaurant Blue Pepper

Nassaukade 366

Amsterdam

Tel. +31 20 4897039