The Ardent Gourmet
Restaurant Review: Restaurant Floreyn: IN AMSTERDAM
“it is so delicious that you pause in holy contemplation.”
December 20, 2018
How is it possible that the herring, mere herring, served at Restaurant Floreyn in Amsterdam is one of the greatest dishes you’ve ever eaten in your life: daring, thrilling, a neutron star of pleasure? Because it is served with horseradish, that’s how. Horseradish? No, not any horseradish, no, no, no. It is horseradish ice cream which is to horseradish as snogging is to a peck on the cheek from your aunt after church. This elegant quenelle is so delicious that you won’t even attempt superlatives to convey how much so. Its flavor and heat - chastened by creaminess, sweetness, and cold – startles, smacks, unhinges you. And it humbles you as you realize that your greatest flight of culinary imagination has never come close to its actuality. The herring filets, red from beet juice, are pickled and meaty, flavored with juniper berry and mustard seed. Rye kernels are blanched, dried for a day, deep fried, and applied for textural punctuation. There are a few other adornments of sauce and decoration, but these are the main elements. Weeks later you are still panting from pleasure.
Herring with horseradish ice cream. Utterly slayed by this awesome dish!
The meal at this trim establishment starts with grissini that you dip in thick yogurt improbably flavored with cumin presaging the revelatory combinations of the meal ahead. You and your wife order a glass of bubbly. The waiter explains that it’s your birthday and so it’s on the house. It isn’t your birthday, you hadn’t stated or suggested it’s your birthday, but now it is. And this defines the restaurant’s ethos altogether: extraordinary hospitality. Because you order a different set menu and wine pairings than your wife (7 dishes to her 5) at one point you get a glass of Chenin Blanc (Teddy Hall from South Africa) that she tastes and loves. Next you know they bring her, gratis, a glass of the same. At the end of the wine service, they pour a luscious South African dessert wine, Heaven on Earth, and you mention to the waiter how much you like it. He tells you that he’s leaving the bottle on the table which you interpret hopefully as an invitation to top off your glass. You do so. Gratis, again.
Restaurant Floreyn bar.
Teddy Hall
Heaven on Earth
An amuse-bouche arrives, bitterballen, or spherical croquettes, yours from mussels, your wife’s (allergic to shellfish) from cheese, along with a mayonnaise flavored by buckling (salted and smoked herring). Next to your bitterballen sits what looks like a chocolate truffle seemingly dipped in metallic red paint giving it the festive look of a Christmas tree ornament. Upon inspection, it is a small knob of chicken liver mousse shellacked with beet juice sitting upon a thin, crisp, flavorful disk of apple. There’s a topknot of crisp salty chicken skin (which itself is decoupaged with mustard cress). It took neurosurgery to create and the flavor is proportional to the effort.
Bitterballen and chicken liver mousse. Notice the chicken skin and mustard cress on top of the chicken liver mousse. Astonishing detail!
An amuse-bouche arrives, just for your wife. It’s a shot glass of clear liquid, described as tomato water. Aha, what’s old is new again. To the best of your knowledge this was originally conceived by the fabled, self-taught chef, Charlie Trotter, USA, circa 1980s, viz. chopped tomatoes set in cheesecloth for a day or two to leak their plasma into a bowl below. The plasma, which is perfectly clear, has intense tomato flavor and aroma. Like a pousse-café there is a layer of basil oil on top. This connection with Charlie Trotter is interesting. He’s little known now but in his day he was celebrated for phenomenally complex and flavorful food. Though you suspect they’re unaware of this kinship, Restaurant Floreyn’s food is no less complex and no less flavorful.
Tomato water with basil oil. Your wife drank most of it in a delirium of pleasure before remembering to take photo.
Next is a simple sunny-side up egg. Not! Your eyes widen. What looks like the disk of egg-white actually is delicious, lightly salted potato mousseline with flecks of fresh garden cress atop. Around it are dollops of goat curd topped with salmon roe and chive oil. Ever attentive to texture, it is strewn with crunchy crumbs of potato and salted-dried egg yolk. The egg-yolk in the center is indeed an egg-yolk, but it’s been cooked sous vide. So it is cooked and soft and orange as though raw. Such wit! Such flavor!
Potato mousseline and sous vide egg yolk. At this point you’re fibrillating with culinary joy.
There is pulled oxtail atop a sensual cream of celeriac and white chocolate, long braised, served within the trench of a marrow bone. Heedful of texture, there are jagged cheese tuille sticking out like plates on the back of a stegosaurus.
Oxtail. You’re in awe!
There is sautéed filet of haddock, slightly crisp, perfectly au point, with mussels and a sauce of red shrimp plus a foam beguiled by tarragon. As if that isn’t enough, there’s a jet-black squiggle bedecking all of this made from mussels and squid ink.
Haddock with mussels and two sauces.
If you have any faint (very faint) criticism of this restaurant it is that both these dishes and perhaps all are festooned with dots and dabs of additional ingredients and sauce. It’s like fine writing somewhat heavy with adverbs. Reduce them and in your view the writing, already excellent, becomes more lithesome yet. Your wife (your foodie-wingwoman) disagrees. She believes that all the dots and stripes and bits and bumps of other ingredients are vital to the whole. She perceives the plating as fine art. Almost always she’s right.
A chop of roe deer (which, it’s explained, is not the same as venison), difficult to cook well because it is so lean, is served a perfect rare in a puddle of demi-glace. Next to it is a disk of roe deer leg filled with minced roe deer, perfect again. There is a square croquette of Balkenbrij, a kind of Dutch haggis, made from the liver and “cut-offs.” Your anti-haggis gene – which you can’t seem to deactivate -- kicks in and you give this wide berth. Perhaps it would have been best were you simply not told it was like haggis. Then you surely would have eaten it happily. There is a mound of cavolo nero (a kind of kale) and small slices of fermented rhubarb.
Roe Deer. You’ve run out of superlatives and the meal isn’t even over.
Somewhere in the mix a warm homemade loaf of bread with caraway is served. There are two butters, cow and goat, one shmeared over the other, that are warm (not cold, unspreadable lumps). Just great!
Warm caraway bread and binary butters: cow and goat. You moo and then you bleat with pleasure.
There is more, much more, that you have insufficient mental RAM to retain, but the two desserts will stay with you all your days. The first, called “Speculaas” (inspired by the spiced Dutch cookie baked for St. Nicholas’ Day), includes a galangal (similar to ginger) ice cream with a tiara of candied bergamot peel, that agitates your endorphins. There is a gel of buckthorn berry and a pate de fruit of mandarin. There is a slice of speculaas cake which includes pepper, cinnamon, ginger, cloves, cardamom and nutmeg. You adore it. It goes wonderfully with the galangal ice cream (which rests atop a crunchy coffee crumble….. these chefs never neglect the interplay of textures.) The plating is beautiful.
Speculaas.
Then, then, then, comes yet another of the culinary tour-de-forces of your lifetime, inverting sweet and savory in a manner that explodes your conception of what food should be, “Hutspot” (inspired by the traditional Dutch dish of mashed potato or parsnip, carrot, and onion). There is parsnip cake, as delicious as carrot cake, maybe better. There is a panna cotta of white chocolate and orange. THEN, atop a scattering of burnt white chocolate crumbs (you’re awestruck; how do they think this up?), there are quenelles of parsnip ice cream, carrot ice cream (along with a meringue of carrot), and a crème brulee which rests atop a cream of caramelized onion. With trepidation you take the parsnip ice cream to your tongue and your life forever changes. Parsnip -- which you associate with dinner at Grandma’s, which you associate with prison food, which you associate with death -- makes among the most delicious ice creams in the world. Like the horseradish ice-cream – defanged by creaminess, sweetness, and cold – it is a flavor revelation. That is an understatement. Detached from the fibrosity of the root and amped by sweetness, the parsnip flavor soars. You lust for it. The carrot ice-cream is good, but not equal. Then, you taste the crème brulee with the underlayment of caramelized onion and are struck dumb. Sweet, yet infused with the root-earthy bass note of caramelized onion, it is so delicious that you pause in holy contemplation. All of the above, as improbable as it seems, is plated like a Kandinsky.
Hutspot with parsnip ice cream and onion creme brulee. A Kandinsky. This dessert has upended your life. It will never be the same.
Along with coffee (or, maybe after; for at this point of the meal – with 5, 6, 7 glasses of wine -- your memory is fragmenting) a shard of peppermint bark (such a small detail, but so exceedingly delicious) is served to fortify you for the cold night ahead. Your wife puts her shard in her purse and nibbles on it over the rest of the week for revitalization like Frodo Baggins nibbled Lembas, Elven bread, to take him through the rough spots on his journey.
The chefs at Restaurant Floreyn are fucking geniuses. A few quibbles aside, all their dishes, even their amuse-bouches, are moon shots, stunningly sophisticated, extravagantly delicious, visually ravishing. They turn savory items (parsnip, onion, horseradish, carrot) into sweets in such a way that it’s hard to remember they were savory in the first place. Their food is layered. Notice the use of such words as, “atop,” “on top,” “over,” “bedecking,” “decoupaged,” “trench,” “underlayment,” “sticking out,” “topknot,” “tiara,” so on. Most dishes are so complex, in terms of ingredients and techniques, you can’t conceive of how the kitchen turns them out. Yet everything seamlessly integrates. As certain surgeries are beyond the capability of most hospitals, dishes of this complexity would overwhelm almost all other kitchens.
Restaurant Floreyn kitchen. Geniuses.
The meal for two with excessive and excellent wine, costs 200 euros (which includes a tip). In other words, value for euro is extraordinarily high. This is one of the very best meals of your life. If you live in Amsterdam or travel through and don’t eat here, you can only be pitied. Go.
Rating (on a scale of 0 to 5)
Food: 5
Ambiance: 5
Service: 5
Overall Value: 5
RESTAURANT FLOREYN
Albert Cuypstraat 31, 1072 NB Amsterdam, Netherlands