Deventer, Netherlands, June 11, 2009—
I READ ABOUT DUTCH "brown bars" in the excited run-up to my first trip to Europe, thirty-six years ago; and the first place I went to on that trip, after checking into my hotel in Amsterdam, was a bruin off the Leidsestraat. I don't think it's there any more. For a while they were a threatened institution.
But they seem to have been making a comeback. The "brown bar" (sometimes "browncafé") gets its name from the dark wood panelling, enhanced in former days by a haze of tobacco smoke. They tend to be dark or at least dim. They're gezellig, of course, that Dutch quality usually translated as "cozy" but characterized also by snugness, comfort, ease, a little bit of sensuousness, and above all nothing special but everything relaxed.
Tonight we had borrelen — drinks — at Dikke van Dale in the Hanseatic river port Deventer, an unspoiled town just northeast of Apeldoorn, just across the boundary in the province of Overijssel. The "dikke van Dale" was a famous dictionary in three fat (dikke) volumes published by Dale many years ago; it was familiar, apparently, to every Dutch schoolchild in those days. Dikke van Dale is a brown bar-restaurant whose walls are covered with books, among them a publicity dummy of the three volumes, which overhung their shelf above us as we had our drinks. We liked the table so much we reserved it for dinner after an hour's walk through this attractive town, made livelier and deafeningly noisier by a kermess filling the streets and marketplaces with garish amusement rides and devices.
On our return I gave in to the tempting weekly menu: a salad with white asparagus draped in salami on a bed of lettuces; an enormous beefsteak on a bed of ratatouille, chili-flavored butter as a sauce; coconut ice cream (with the compulsory ball of sweetened whipped cream) and a sixth of a small, nicely ripened pineapple. It may be a bruin, but Dikke has a vaguely tropical attitude.
Aged genever; house rosé, then red
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