Herring, Stroopwafels and Roti: A Food Walk Through Amsterdam's De Pijp

From the old Heineken brewery down the Albert Cuyp Market to Sarphati's park, a diamond factory, two ball-playing gnomes and the grand hotel on the Amstel: how a speculators' quarter became Amsterdam's kitchen

Amsterdam · 10 stops · 23 min audio · Generated October 2026

1. Heineken Experience: The Brewery Outside the Walls

Stadhouderskade 78, 1072 AE Amsterdam, Netherlands

Stand by the water of the Singelgracht and face the long red-brick building with the green lettering and the brewery towers. For more than a hundred and twenty years, this was where Amsterdam's most famous beer was actually made. When it opened in 1867 there was almost nothing around it... just meadows, ditches and the old city line marked by the canal behind you.

The man behind it was Gerard Adriaan Heineken. In 1864, aged just twenty-two, he bought an old brewery in the city centre called De Hooiberg, the Haystack. The family story goes that he wanted Amsterdammers drinking beer instead of gin. Within three years he needed space, clean water and room to grow, and there was only one place to find all three: outside the walls, right here.

But the real secret was not bricks. It was yeast. In 1886 the company's chemist, Hartog Elion, a pupil of Louis Pasteur, cultivated a single pure strain of yeast in the firm's laboratory. It became known as the A-yeast, and it gave the beer the same taste batch after batch, year after year. A Dutch brewery had turned beer into a laboratory science... and that consistency is a big part of why the green bottle travelled the world.

In 1988 brewing stopped here for good, and production moved to a far larger plant outside the city. In 1991 the old brewery opened to visitors, and since 2001 it has been called the Heineken Experience. Part of the site became housing and a square behind the building, and here is a detail almost nobody notices: the Marie Heinekenplein, named in 1994, is not named after the brewer at all, but after Marie Heineken, a relative of his and a painter of flowers.

Everything you will see on this walk grew up in the brewery's shadow. The streets behind it were thrown up for the workers of breweries, factories and docks, and they have been feeding the city ever since. So follow the Ferdinand Bolstraat south, past the end of the brewery, to the corner where the striped awnings of the market begin.
2. Albert Cuyp Market: Herring and Kibbeling

Albert Cuypstraat at Ferdinand Bolstraat, 1072 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Turn the corner and look east along the Albert Cuypstraat: a canyon of striped awnings, hanging bags, crates of fruit and the cries of stallholders, running on as far as you can see. Somewhere in there a fish stall has a tray of silver fillets on ice, a bowl of chopped onions and a small queue of people who know exactly what they want.

The market began the way most good markets do, without permission. Street traders and pushcarts gathered here as soon as the houses filled up, and in 1905 the city gave in and made it official, at first only on Saturday evenings. From 1912 it ran in daylight, six days a week. The street is named after Aelbert Cuyp, a seventeenth-century painter famous for cows standing in golden evening light. There are no cows here now... but there is plenty of everything else.

Now, the herring. The one to wait for is the Hollandse Nieuwe, the first young herring of the season, caught in early summer when the fish is fat. It is only lightly salted, and the trick that made it possible is old: the fishermen remove the gills and most of the gut, but leave a small organ whose enzymes slowly ripen the fish. Legend credits the method to a fourteenth-century fisherman from Zeeland, Willem Beukelszoon. Herring fed the Dutch and filled their ships, and Amsterdammers like to say their city was built on herring bones.

There are two schools of eating it. The Amsterdam way is chopped into pieces with raw onion and a little pickle. The bold way is to take it by the tail, tilt your head back and lower the whole fillet into your mouth like a sword swallower. If raw fish is a step too far, ask for kibbeling instead: chunks of white fish in batter, fried and served hot with a garlicky sauce, once a way to use up the cheeks and offcuts of salted cod.

Somewhere along this street stands a bronze statue of the singer André Hazes, unveiled in 2005, who was discovered as a boy singing on this market. Walk a short block east along the stalls, then turn left up the Eerste van der Helststraat to a little square full of café tables.
3. Gerard Douplein: Painters' Streets and the Baker Who Saved De Pijp

Gerard Douplein, 1072 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Pull up a mental chair on this little square: café terraces under the trees, bicycles leaning on every pole, and tall narrow houses of dark brick rising on all sides. It feels like a village green. Yet a hundred and fifty years ago this was a muddy building site on the edge of a city in a hurry.

Look at the street signs around you and you are walking through a museum catalogue. Gerard Dou, Frans Hals, Jan Steen, Ferdinand Bol, Govert Flinck, Van Ostade, Van der Helst... the planners named De Pijp after the painters of the Golden Age. Gerard Dou was Rembrandt's first pupil in Leiden, and he became a master of tiny, polished scenes painted with brushes of only a few hairs. Legend says he would sit and wait for the dust to settle before he dared to touch the paint. In his own lifetime he was one of the best-paid painters in the country.

The houses, though, were not built with that kind of care. From the 1870s speculators put up long, narrow blocks as fast and as cheaply as they could, to house the workers flooding into the city. Some say the long straight streets reminded people of pipes, which is one explanation for the name De Pijp... nobody really knows. By the 1960s many of these homes were damp and crumbling, and the city drew up plans to tear large parts of the neighbourhood down.

That is where a pastry baker comes into the story. Jan Schaefer, a baker turned community activist, helped the residents fight off the large-scale demolition, and later became the city's alderman for housing, from 1978 to 1986. His most famous line, in Amsterdam slang, means roughly: you cannot live in hot air. Instead of bulldozers, De Pijp got renewal block by block, and the people stayed.

They were joined by students, artists, and newcomers from Suriname, Turkey and Morocco, which is why this is still the most crowded, noisiest and tastiest corner of Amsterdam. Head back down to the market and turn left, east, along the stalls... and follow the smell of warm syrup.
4. Albert Cuyp Market: Stroopwafels and the Sugar Trade

Albert Cuypstraat, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Find the stall where two hot irons clamp down on little balls of dough, and watch closely. The baker lifts out a thin, crisp waffle, slices it in half sideways while it is still hot, spreads it with dark syrup and presses it shut again. That is a stroopwafel, a syrup waffle, and the fresh one in your hand has very little to do with the ones in a packet.

The stroopwafel comes from Gouda, the cheese town, where bakers were making them by the early nineteenth century. The story goes that they began as a thrifty trick, a way to turn leftover crumbs and scraps into something sweet with a little syrup. One Gouda baker, Gerard Kamphuisen, is often named as the inventor, though the details are hard to pin down. For a long time it was a cheap treat for poor families, sold warm on the street. Then the whole country fell for it.

Here is the Dutch way to eat one at home. Pour a cup of coffee or tea, lay the stroopwafel flat on top of the cup and wait a minute or two. The steam softens the syrup until it begins to stretch... and then you bite. On the market you do not need to wait: it comes off the iron already warm and slightly chewy.

But behind the syrup there is a harder story. In the seventeenth century Amsterdam was one of the great sugar-refining cities of Europe, with dozens of refineries along its canals. The raw sugar came from plantations in the Americas, including the Dutch colony of Suriname, worked by enslaved Africans. Syrup, stroop, is what is left over when sugar is refined, and the sweet tooth of this country was built on that trade.

That history is not far away on this market. Further east, the stalls start to smell of curry, roti and peanut sauce, the flavours of people whose families came from those colonies. Keep walking east along the Albert Cuypstraat, almost to the end of the market, where it meets the Van Woustraat.
5. Albert Cuyp Market East: Roti and Rijsttafel

Albert Cuypstraat at Van Woustraat, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Breathe in at the eastern end of the market: cumin, garlic, frying onions, peanut sauce. Between the fabric stalls and the phone covers you will spot trays of bright yellow flatbreads, jars of sambal and bags of spices whose names are in Sranan and Javanese as well as Dutch. For a lot of Amsterdammers, this is what home cooking smells like.

To understand that smell you have to go back to 1667. At the peace of Breda that year, the Dutch kept Suriname, on the north coast of South America, and the English kept New Amsterdam, which they had renamed New York. Suriname became a plantation colony worked by enslaved Africans. Slavery was abolished there in 1863, but the formerly enslaved were forced to keep working for another ten years, until 1873.

To replace them, the planters brought in contract labourers, first from British India and later from Java. Their descendants made roti, a soft flatbread wrapped around curried chicken, potato, long beans and egg, part of Surinamese cooking. When Suriname became independent in 1975, tens of thousands of Surinamese moved to the Netherlands, many of them to Amsterdam, and cheap, crowded neighbourhoods like De Pijp were where many first found rooms.

The other great flavour here comes from Indonesia, and it hides a paradox. The famous rijsttafel, the rice table, with a dozen or more small dishes around a mountain of rice, is not a traditional Indonesian meal. It was a colonial invention, a showpiece banquet of the Dutch in the East Indies, served by a long line of waiters. After the Netherlands recognised Indonesian independence in 1949, many people from the colonial society came here, bringing their recipes and opening their own shops. Today the rijsttafel survives far more in the Netherlands than in Indonesia.

So every bite on this corner is a history lesson, sweet, sour and sometimes painful. Now leave the market and walk south down the Tweede Sweelinckstraat, where the houses open onto the trees of a park.
6. Sarphatipark: The Doctor Who Baked the City's Bread

Sarphatipark, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Follow the path through the park to the little hill with the fountain on it: a tall stone monument, water splashing into basins, and at its heart a bust of a bearded man. Ducks on the pond, children on the grass, a dog chasing nothing in particular. It is the calmest spot in De Pijp, and it is named after one of the most restless men Amsterdam ever produced.

Samuel Sarphati was born in 1813 into a Portuguese-Jewish family and trained as a doctor in Leiden. He saw his patients die of cholera and filth, and decided the cure was not in medicine alone. In 1847 he helped get organised waste collection going in the city. He set up a company to bake cheap, honest bread for working families, at a time when bread was dear and often poor. He founded a trade school, built a vast exhibition hall of glass and iron, the Paleis voor Volksvlijt, and dreamed up a grand hotel on the Amstel... where this walk will end.

And this park? In an earlier city plan, this exact spot was meant for a railway station. Instead, nineteen years after Sarphati's death in 1866, the city engineer Jacobus van Niftrik began laying out a romantic English landscape garden of about four and a half hectares, and in 1886 the monument went up in his honour.

There is a dark chapter too. In August 1942 the German occupiers renamed the park, because Sarphati was Jewish, and removed his bust from the monument. On the eighteenth of May 1945, two weeks after liberation, the old name came back and the bust was put back in its place.

A footnote for art lovers: the young Piet Mondriaan lived and painted on the edge of this park for a few years before he left for Paris. Now leave the park on its southern side, cross the busy Ceintuurbaan, and head south into the newer part of De Pijp, towards streets where the brick starts to move.
7. De Dageraad: The Dawn of Amsterdam School Housing

Pieter Lodewijk Takstraat, 1073 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Stand at the corner and let your eyes follow the brick: it curves around the corner like a wave, climbs into rounded towers and rolls down again under roofs of orange tiles. The windows sit in little rhythms, the balconies bulge, and nothing is quite straight. It looks like a palace or a ship. It was built as homes for working families.

This is De Dageraad, the Dawn, named after the socialist housing association that commissioned it. It went up around 1920, designed by two architects of the so-called Amsterdam School, Michel de Klerk and Piet Kramer, as part of the plan for south Amsterdam drawn up by Hendrik Berlage. There are 294 apartments and six shops, and the site was originally reserved for a hospital, whose planned layout still shapes the blocks.

What was revolutionary was the idea behind the brick. Since the Housing Act of 1901, associations like this one could borrow public money to build decent homes, and these architects decided that workers deserved beauty as well as plumbing. They treated brick almost like clay, modelling it into curves and towers, so that an ordinary family coming home from the factory walked into something that looked like a monument.

Michel de Klerk did not live to see the movement he led grow old. He died in 1923, aged only thirty-nine. And look at the names of the two squares in the complex: Henriëtte Ronnerplein and Thérèse Schwartzeplein. Henriëtte Ronner-Knip was a painter famous across Europe for her cats, and Thérèse Schwartze was the most sought-after portrait painter of her day. In a neighbourhood named after men of the Golden Age, two women finally got their streets.

The complex became a national monument in 1974, and a small museum about this architecture opened inside it in 2012. From here, walk east towards the Tolstraat, where a red-brick castle once full of diamonds is waiting.
8. Asscher Diamond Factory: Where the Cullinan Was Split

Tolstraat 127, 1074 VJ Amsterdam, Netherlands

Take in the building on the Tolstraat with the tower, the battlements and the rows of enormous windows. It looks like a small fortress, but those windows give the game away. Diamond polishing needs daylight, as much of it as possible, and this whole building was designed to catch it.

It was built in 1907 for the Asscher diamond company, to a design by the architect Gerrit van Arkel. In its heyday more than five hundred polishers worked at the benches here, and the streets around it became known as the Diamond Quarter. Look at the street signs nearby: Diamantstraat, Smaragdstraat for emerald, Saffierstraat for sapphire, and the Cullinanplein.

That last name is the big one. In 1905 a South African mine produced the largest gem-quality rough diamond ever found, the Cullinan. It was presented to King Edward the Seventh, and the job of cutting it went to the Asschers. In January 1908 Abraham Asscher collected it in London, and on the tenth of February, in this building, Joseph Asscher struck the blow that split it in two. Legend says he fainted straight afterwards. He himself only admitted to a rush of nerves. The biggest stones cut from it now sit in the British Crown Jewels.

The diamond trade in Amsterdam was largely a Jewish trade, and the occupation destroyed it. According to the company's history, of some five hundred Asscher polishers only about fifteen survived the war, and only ten members of the family survived. The firm rebuilt slowly afterwards, and in 1980 it received the royal title.

Today most of the building is apartments, but the main tower is still the company's headquarters... a fortress of light with a very dark past. Now walk north towards the Ceintuurbaan, close to where it meets the Amstel, and look up for two little men playing ball on a rooftop.
9. Huis met de Kabouters: The Gnomes Who Play Ball

Ceintuurbaan 251-255, 1074 Amsterdam, Netherlands

Look up at the gables of the building with the carved wooden balconies: two chubby green gnomes in red caps and red shorts, each about two and a half metres tall. One holds a red ball. The other leans forward with his hands out, waiting for the throw. Amsterdammers call it the Huis met de Kabouters, the House with the Gnomes.

It is a joke, and a very Dutch one: a visual pun. The man who commissioned the building was called Van Ballegooijen, and in Dutch that surname sounds like ball-throwing. So the architect, A. C. Boerma, put two ball-throwers on the roof for everyone to see. Imagine signing a contract with your builder and finding that he had illustrated your surname three storeys high.

The building itself, finished in 1884, is three houses joined together, and it cannot decide what century it belongs to. There are pointed Gothic windows and little gargoyles, Renaissance-style cross windows and stone blocks, and so much carved woodwork that it looks like a Swiss chalet that has wandered into the city. It became a national monument in 1984.

Of course, gnomes come with legends. Some say the ball changes hands every night at midnight. Others insist it only happens on New Year's Eve... and the most patient version says you will see it only on the twenty-ninth of February, in a leap year. Nobody has filmed it yet.

There is a serious point under the joke. The Ceintuurbaan, the belt road, was laid out in the 1880s along the southern edge of the new quarter, at the same time as the cheap speculative blocks you saw earlier. While some builders cut every corner, someone here spent money on wood carving and humour, just to be noticed. Now walk to the end of the street, cross the Amstel on the Nieuwe Amstelbrug and follow the far bank north to a white palace on the water.
10. Amstel Hotel: Sarphati's Palace on the River

Professor Tulpplein 1, 1018 GX Amsterdam, Netherlands

Stop on the riverbank and let the building fill your view: a long, pale palace with mansard roofs and rows of tall windows, its terrace stepping right down to the water of the Amstel. Boats slide past, and the whole thing looks as if it had been shipped in from Paris.

It is the last of Samuel Sarphati's dreams, the doctor from the park. He believed Amsterdam needed a hotel worthy of a capital, to bring in visitors and money, and he pushed the project through. He never saw it finished. Sarphati died in June 1866, and the hotel, designed by Cornelis Outshoorn, opened the following year. And here is the surprise: the front was originally meant to face the Sarphatistraat. Money ran out, and only the wing along the river was built... so the grandest hotel in the city is, in a sense, unfinished.

Notice the date, too: 1867, the same year the Heineken brewery opened at the start of this walk. And the river in front of you gave its name to Heineken's great rival. The Amstel brewery was founded in 1870 not far from here, on the Mauritskade. To keep its lager cold in summer, it cut ice from the frozen canals in winter and stored it in double-walled cellars. Heineken bought its rival in 1968, and in 1982 the Amstel brewery closed.

The river is older than any of it. Around the thirteenth century, people living at the mouth of the Amstel built a dam across it, and the settlement took its name from the dam. In 1275 the people of Amestelledamme were granted freedom from tolls by the Count of Holland, the first written mention of the city.

So that is De Pijp: two breweries, a doctor's dreams, a market that started without permission, and flavours carried here from three continents. You started at a brewery outside the old walls, and you finish beside the river that gave the city, and its beer, a name. If you are hungry again... the market is only a short walk back.