What to Do in Amsterdam-Noord, the Dutch Capital’s Coolest Neighborhood

Almost 22 million visitors—a staggering 27.5 times Amsterdam’s population—descended on the city’s cobblestone streets in 2019. Following the onset of the pandemic, its nearby council took techniques to limit these crowds, like voting to shift its infamous pink-light-weight district to a new purpose-built community outside the house the town middle (the area is nevertheless TBD) outlawing nonresidents from lights up spliffs and launching splashy campaigns to nudge guests to other places. Just one of these is Amsterdam-Noord, a curious corner locals have recognised about for decades, just 4 miles north of downtown. It normally takes only a free five-minute ferry hop from Central Station, the city’s principal transport hub, to obtain this district, which has crafted up its innovative cred considering that the early 2010s. Its defunct factories, which at the time cranked out cargo ships and steel, have been overtaken by freethinking cooks, tech get started-ups, and edgy artists who have turned Noord’s once-gritty industrial parks into the city’s most envelope-pushing inventive spaces. 

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Set out on a culture crawl

While it is really all about the Aged Masters and Van Gogh in Amsterdam’s museum quarter, Noord’s artwork areas zero in on a more latest period. At the angular Eye Filmmuseum, which heralded Noord’s cultural genesis when it opened in 2012, the long-lasting collection showcases Hollywood memorabilia and vintage cameras, though pop-up exhibitions discover every thing from Dutch film directors to identified-footage cinema. A 15-minute stroll north, the new Nxt Museum appears continue to even further ahead, exploring a long term of art that blurs the boundaries of technological know-how and structure by way of immersive audiovisual installations and place-spanning interactive video clip works. And on the Noordwall promenade, a multi-use area is household to the artist collective Sexyland Globe, which operates a conceptual nightclub and experimental art galleries. The programming modifications day-to-day anticipate everything from political drag reveals to reserve readings and performances by avant-garde global musicians.

Sample the buzzy cafe scene

Hidden in unassuming shipyards and the moment-deserted industrial estates, Noord’s best bars and eating institutions usually make you seem 2 times. Hotel de Goudfazant is a situation in issue: This perennially packed cafe, which occupies a cavernous previous garage in a concrete-and-metal advanced on the eastern riverbank, has been a community mainstay because it opened in 2006, serving French-tinged fare to company seated in plastic canteen chairs. The seasonal menu is large on seafood, but the crispy-skinned rotisserie hen is a favored amongst regulars. In a transformed warehouse a few doorways down, bistro-slash-indie cinema FC Hyena serves all-natural wines and dishes up unpretentious smaller bites such as roast cauliflower with tahini and grilled octopus with tomatillo salsa. There are tables set up in its vibrant lobby, but you can take your purchase into its two screening rooms, which present art-residence flicks and traditional films on Tuesdays. 

Head to Oedipus Brewing, on the edge of the previous Stork steel manufacturing facility grounds, for beers infused with galangal, orange peel, or Sichuan pepper, produced mere yards absent Henri Rousseau’s artwork impressed the colourful partitions, and the guys powering burger truck The Beef Chief consider over the Oedipus kitchen area from Thursday via Sunday, cooking up pork-tummy patties and hand-slash fries drizzled with gochujang mayo. Equally hops-centric is IJver, an industrial hangout in just the much bigger shipbuilding hangar on the NDSM Wharf. The bar, which operates just about the full duration of the restaurant, has a whopping 19 types of beer on tap (and various dozens bottled), even though the open kitchen serves cross-border comfort and ease foodstuff like rendang sandwiches and soba-noodle bowls.

The garage block bookending the industrial Papaverweg is also drawing foodie crowds with its cohort of enterprises. In late 2019 pop-up pizzeria Klaproos turned a humdrum workplace place there into a sultry, candlelit dining space, where you’ll uncover nicely-priced antipasti and pizzas with spicy nduja, white truffle, or vegan mozzarella on sunny times, snag a picnic table on the waterside terrace at the back again of the creating. Subsequent doorway, Corner Keep, housed in a reduced-slung previous storage space, opened past June following the lockdown ended and rapidly turned a person of the city’s most in-demand from customers tables. The vegetable-ahead, Asian-influenced menu—think yellow beets with pickled daikon and mushroom karaage—has diners from all above Amsterdam rushing for a desk on to start with-come, very first-served Fridays and Saturdays (they do just take reservations from Tuesday to Thursday). Beverages consist of purely natural wines and sake, poured guiding a picket bar that doubles as a DJ booth—a nod to the stamp-measurement listening bars of Tokyo.