There’s nothing hipper right now than chucking some vintage chairs and tables, a kitchen and some staff into an untouched former warehouse – and it would seem that nobody, nobody, is doing it better than those terribly hip Dutch folk. Amsterdam’s Restaurant Stork, and Eindhoven’s Radio Royaal are two recently featured specimens – and the capital’s Hotel de Goudfazant is yet another prime example. Equally un-embellished, equally achingly-hip.
As if playing a virtual game of hip-venue Top Trumps, Hotel de Goudfazant has gone all out to score highly – first up, there’s the name (not really a hotel, tricky little buggers), then there’s that centrepiece; a whopping great chandelier made from glass bottles, suspended from the industrial rafters like a showpiece of über-hippness – goading those who fail to live up to its swagger of self importance. Then, this venue’s pièce de résistance: classic super-cars, dotted around as casually as other restaurants may do with the odd Eames chair… oh look, a white Ferrari Testarossa behind the wine fridge… yah, that’s just the way we roll…
The menu is casual, of course, echoing its surroundings it is unfussy but stylish, whilst the furnishings are pure school canteen – you probably have sat in a chair this cheap and nasty since you were outside the headmaster’s office in primary school. Located waterside in Noord (North Amsterdam), Hotel de Goudfazant is vast, stylish, surprisingly unpretentious, and oh so bleeding hip.
