IENS – a Dutch restaurant guide

Whoever wants to go eating and doesn’t know where to go looks up a restaurant guide. The web makes it possible to do this searches on one’s computer. Two examples in Germany are the online guide by the Guide Michelin and the Gault Millau. But the flip side is that they contain just a selected number of locations.

In the Netherlands they’ve got with IENS an online restaurant guide which is compiled by the opinions and judgements of visitors of the restaurants. So an index of 17.000 restaurants came into being, about which over 70.000 visitors gave their judgements. Visitors can participate at the review process by writing short opinions or by passing a judgement via a form where they can give scores for meals, service and decor. On the website you have a locator, where you can find via the place, the cuisine and some further criteria – such as accessibility or a terrace – the appropriate restaurant. Because of the broad range you can browse both top restaurants and more basic restaurants such as fast food restaurants, ice cream parlors, juice bars or pancake houses. You can order the search results by the street, the place or the score for the meals.

The in IENS compiled reviews are also published in books. For each restaurant which is mentioned in the books there are data and a short description derived from the visitor’s notes.

The broad range of mentioned restaurants leads sometimes to surprising results. The Beluga in Maastricht, one of the top restaurants in the Netherlands, had once the following scores:

• Meals: 9.0
• Service: 8.6
• Decor: 9.0

The ice cream parlor Lisone in Heerlen had at the same time these scores:

• Meals: 9.0
• Service: 8.0
• Decor: 7.0

Thus the meals in the top restaurant and in the ice cream parlor had equal scores. This makes clear that these scores should be looked upon while taking account of the cuisine and the services for the particular consumers. In a similar situation the American movie reviewer Roger Ebert pointed out that, when you’re asking a friend if the movie Hellboy is any good, you’re not asking if it is any good compared to Mystic River, but if it is any good compared to The Punisher. For our example this means: When you want to have an excellent diner in South Limburg, you can consider the Beluga. When you want to have an ice and are near Heerlen, you can visit the Lisone. Barring the fact that you can learn more about the top restaurants elsewhere, the reviews in IENS are a good opportunity to get an idea about a particular restaurant.

Cafés, pubs and bars in the Netherlands

In the Netherlands cafés (including pubs and bars) are a popular hangout. They are called the “society´s living room” and are characterised by atmosphere and sociability. The typical example is the “bruin café” (brown café). The brownness in these cafés has been achieved by year-long smoking (in these days the preferred agent is paint). Cafés are especially common in the southern provinces of North Brabant and Limburg, but elsewhere in the country are many places to walk in.

When you want to have a reference in this broad range, you can look up the Café Top 100. Misset Horeca, a trade journal for the hotel and restaurant business, startet in 1994 with a competition to point customers and tradesmen to good cafés. For this purpose from a list of 40-50 suggestions 10 cafés has been nominated. Among the finalists the Café of the Year has been elected. From 2003 on a ranking of the 100 best Dutch cafés is published. The title “Café van het Jaar” (Café of the Year) goes to the first café on that list. The results are determined by a jury which judges the cafés according to the following factors:

• hospitality
• atmophere and appeal
• hygiene
• treatment of products
• operator / barkeeper

The current list of the 100 best cafés can be looked up here. To refine the search, you also can look up a particular province. Added to these are the cafés worth mentioning, which didn´t quite made it into the Top 100. A café, which has received the award “Café of the Year”, is kept for at least three years in the Honorary Gallery and doesn´t take part in the ranking. For each café mentioned you can look up further data.

This website should be a good starting point for the aspiring visitor of Dutch cafés, where different cafés are mentioned. The judgement are certainly subjective, but you can check these on a visit, with the chance of making new discoveries. Furthermore, there are more than 10.000 cafés, pubs and bars in the Netherlands.