Cafés are Amsterdam's true third space.

Three new openings are brilliant examples of the city's café scene.

On a wintry, two-tone day when the sky is an unsettled sea, a café is a harbour.

Amsterdam has plenty of them. For a Brit like me who’s lived here just over a year, they’re still a novelty. You can spend time in a café, guilt-free, leafing through bashed up Het Parools or watching small boats pootle along the water. They’re safe spaces that blur time. A coffee in the morning might lead to a snacky lunch. Before you know it, it’s cocktails at dusk.

To me, cafés feel distinctly European. They’re less about the sale and more about the moment. We don’t have café culture in the UK. We have coffee shops but the focus is mostly on the coffee itself. You can meet a friend and take a sun-dappled picture for Instagram, but coffee shops don’t encourage the same languid, laissez-faire life – especially when they’re packed with freelancers crunching away at their laptops. We do have pubs but they’re loud, booze-first spaces. Try sitting in one for as long as you’d be in a café – you’ll leave pissed as a fart.

The essence of a café is the grand sense of nothing happening. By doing nothing, you often find something. This something is trickier to define. It might be as simple as a thought to carry with you for the rest of the day. It might be as much as deciding on political revolution. Or it really might be embracing the value of nothingness by counting the passing pootling boats.

Amsterdam does them well: brightly lit, big-windowed spaces that shine from street corners. There’s an always an older couple sitting outside in puffer jackets. They don’t talk, just watch. How beautiful. Three new openings have me even more enraptured.

Café Linden

Cafe de Linden in de Jordaan feels timeless yet distinctly modern. There’s a sense of quiet luxury to the place. I’d go here over a garish bar any day. It reminds me, in fact, of a sleeping lion, with its rich brown colours and gold-rimmed bar and general yawning nature. But at night, it must roar. If I drank, I’d come here for double-dose negronis. Obviously, I don’t drink and this is another reason why I adore the café, they’re not all about boozing. They’re democratic spaces with something for everyone.

Danish sardines – I was quite literally obsessed.

Simplicity is at the core of Linden. I ordered a tin of sardines. It came with a lemon wedge and bolt of baguette from the excellent Louf. That was it, that was the plate. How chic! When was the last time you sat down to eat a tin of sardines with some bread? Nothing else on the menu was much grander than this – but it didn’t feel lazy at all. This, like most café food, was a plate to compliment a drink or two, perfect for massaging out the thoughts we have in our head. With my sardines, I couldn’t look up, I had to happily concentrate on forking fish and not dripping oil over my trousers. It created a mindfulness, one that expanded out beyond the confines of the plate.

A proper combo at Combo.

Am I being a bit much? You’ll excuse me – I’ve sat in cafés all week, letting my mind wander. Another new opening is Caffè Combo, a Mediterranean café at the end of Vondelpark. Combo feels altogether warmer with its blocks of blue like falling Tetris pieces. A cute mezzanine set-up sparkles with checkered floors. I could have been in Southern Europe.

I was told the chef recently changed – I never knew the old one, but I rate this new one. My sourdough with egg, cheese and chilli oil was a complete success. It reminded me of the egg, chilli, cheese at The Dusty Knuckle in London, a highly successful and now relatively famous dish. The mix of fat, grease and heady flavour between eggs and cheese just works. I also had a coffee, which was rich and delicious. And – ten points – I was given tap water without asking. I want to go back to Combo to try their evening menu. I strongly suspect it’ll be worth it.

Café Marcella.

There are other classic cafés I must mention, especially Café Marcella. I’ve written about this spot before: Marcella is wrapped candy. Its interiors are a bar of gold. The canal-side location is perfect for out-of-towners, who’ll appreciate sitting by a canal and chomping through molten-hot bitterballen. Marcella, like all good cafés, distorts time. I’ve gone for a drink and stayed so long the sky went dark. I’m also regularly charmed by my visits to Café Jacob, whose cock-and-mocktails are a cut above (is cock-and-mock a thing? Could I make it one?). They’re perfect for sipping on outside. Yes, Bilderdijkstraat is quite busy but I’m not against breathing in a lungful of car fumes. It reminds me of London.

My third new opening is Café Kompleet, which used to be Café Komeet before they changed their name for (I’m guessing) legal reasons. Shame, because I enjoyed the double meaning of Komeet – meaning ‘come eat’ but also comet, which was part of their logo (do you get it? Do you?). Kompleet sprawls over two rooms, with a bar-like area in one and a dining area in the other. It draws influence from the brown bar. Admittedly, there’s something a little grey-haired grandad about it. I felt the urge to mine a crossword, smoke a pipe, even blow my nose into an initialed hanky. This is no bad thing – I think I’ll make an excellent geriatric.

Pekelvlees.

The food in Kompleet was good: my pekelvlees sandwich was shoebox-sized and tasted glorious with its mess of stringy sauerkraut. My apple cake was warm and brown, like the interiors. I left desperately full.

Ah, but isn’t that is the beauty of the café? You will leave full. If not of food, then of life and thought, of a sense that you have taken part in something communal, a shared space – both physical and intellectual.

Enough café-induced musings for now.

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OK BYE!

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