Restaurant Review: Bridges, Amsterdam

As you may have noticed while reading some of our previous blog posts, we love food… so much that we had to bold it! Tasting, smelling, and seeing different types of food, has become one one of our favorite things about traveling around the world. So when we arrived in Amsterdam we knew we had to make our way to the Michelin starred-restaurant, Bridges.

Bridges is located in the five star Sofitel Legend The Grand Amsterdam between the two oldest canals in the city. Their culinary style can be described as a combination (or dare we say BRIDGE) between Dutch and French traditions, with an emphasis on fish. The kitchen is lead by head chef Bobby Rust who is showing off his skills and turning out some incredible dishes, which we can attest to after eating there.

To experience our own gastronomic journey, we opted to indulge in their four course Menu Du Chef with wine pairings and it was absolutely amazing.

Our journey began with a perfectly cooked pan fried langoustine with goat cheese-elderflower cream beneath watermelon and cucumber squares. Elderflower cream… now doesn’t that sound lovely! We never knew langoustine could taste that delicious or be so tender!

This was followed by a lacquered Monkfish in a beautiful red beat root sauce with oyster carrot and a dash of liquorice powder. As mentioned above, Bridges puts a large focus on delivering dishes with the freshest fish in Holland and the Monkfish let that focus shine through. The fish was perfectly prepared, and the beat root was an unexpected twist that complimented the fish in it’s own way.

After our first two seafood dishes we made our way back to land with the pan fried sweetbread of veal with eggplant and fermented garlic. Neither of us had every tasted sweetbread before and we weren’t really sure what it was or what to expect. In fact, the only time we had every heard of it was in the movie Ratatouille (if you haven’t seen it go watch it now… it’s great!), but after our first bite we immediately fell in love. If you aren’t sure what sweetbread is (we weren’t), it’s a culinary term restaurants use when cooking either the thymus or pancreas of (usually) a calf or lamb… we have to agree that seeing sweetbread on the menu sounds much tastier than pancreas.

In this case ours was a veal sweetbread and the best comparison we could make is that it was like having the best foie gras we ever tasted but bigger and more delicious. We’ve eaten a lot of food at a lot of different restaurants throughout our travels, but this was one of our favorite dishes so far.

In addition to all the delicious foods we ate, the wine pairings were spot on. We’ve become a bit of amateur wine connoisseurs over the past 9 months since visiting close to a dozen different wineries across multiple countries, and each of the wines we were severed at Bridges were perfect. Not to mention the glasses were pretty generous. We’ve done some pairings before where the waiter had a light hand on the pour, but at Bridges we were given a real glass of wine to go with every course.

Just as impressive as the wines was our waiters knowledge and description of each wine. For every glass we received a detailed explanation of where the wine and grapes were from, the taste we can expect and why it was chosen for that specific course. The service at Bridges was second to none.

After eating four courses, plus an amuse-bouche of cockles and clams, and drinking five glasses of wine (four with the pairing and we had an extra glass of sparkling wine with our amuse because you can never have too much wine) we went home extremely satisfied and feeling great.

Thank you Bridges for taking us on a gastronomic journey filled with delicious foods and wines!

As always, our opinions are our own as we Talk Travel.