12 Te Travel Guide Streets ahead


In Amsterdam’s east end, immigrants from former Dutch colonies are reshaping the city’s cultural life with bars that double as community hubs, arthouse cinemas and restaurants celebrating Asian flavours. Words: Ellen Himelfarb


Promotional Content • Saturday 28 January 2023


Amstel River PHOTOGRAPH: WESLEY VERHOEVE


glasses of rosé look like liquid gold. A teak cruiser swishes up the Amstel River, its wake unsettling houseboats moored to the bank. As they bob, a cargo bike pulls up and a gaggle of children clamber out to splash about in the water. Twenty years ago, when the east


P


side of the Amstel was considered the wrong side of the river, the swimmers might have been seen as especially hardy. Such thoughts are barely conceivable now on this poplar-lined bank, overlooked by elegant gables and burnished stained glass, with laid-back electropop drifting in from the next bar. Over time, the city has spun that


perceived liability into multiple assets. In the streets behind Café Hesp, brutalist office blocks have been boldly transformed for a diverse young crowd, which moves from brunch spot to cocktail lounge like hands on a clock. Cafés and wine bars have brought new zing to Pretoriusstraat, a South African district with a soaring mosaic of Nelson Mandela. When my Oost-end friends first


brought me to the Amstel years back, we watched the annual Sinterklaas boat parade sail by this exact spot. Onlookers cheered at the Dutch Santa — accompanied, as is tradition, by his ‘slave’, Zwarte Piet, a white Dutchman in blackface, wearing an afro wig. Soon after, disaffection with this tired, offensive performance


atrons on the riverbank terrace outside Café Hesp are bathing in the kind of sunset that’s making their


bubbled up. Two Dutch-Caribbean artists from this side of the Amstel mobilised thousands of youths and led a successful campaign to ‘Kick Out Zwarte Piet’. Te slave disappeared from the Sinterklaas parade in 2014. I’ve returned to Amsterdam


since, and have come to understand ‘Oost’ as a byword for creativity and red-brick regeneration — a remedy for 20th-century homogeneity and decline. In an era of huge attitude change, it’s become a sort of urban Camelot; not despite of its great diversity but because of it. By nightfall, a cool breeze is


wafting through Café Hesp, so I retreat inland, toward the gates of Oosterpark. Friends are waiting for me at Bar Bukowski, a gregarious watering hole where typewriters as decor are a nod to its namesake. It’s heaving with revellers silly on gin cocktails and, at my table, Gladjanus beer from the brewpub around the corner. At the bar is owner Riad Farhat, frontman of the so-called Tree Wise Men of the East, a trio of entrepreneurs who’ve steadily launched one social lodestone after another. Nightlife in Oost inevitably involves an aperitif or nightcap at one of Riad’s joints. A design obsessive, he’s modelled them as the anti ‘brown cafe’, those murky pubs that used to count for entertainment around here. “I didn’t want my place to be brown,” he tells me. A son of Berber immigrants, Riad


noticed a tonal change when his neighbours started being replaced by young professionals with fashionable


Outside seating at Studio/K PHOTOGRAPH: WESLEY VERHOEVE


tastes and money to spend. “My friends said, ‘Don’t do it,’” he roars over the din, referring to the time in 2007 when he quit bartending to take a chance setting up his first brasserie. “But places like this were desperately needed.” Oost had a surplus of disused heritage properties, untapped gastro talent and a diverse crowd. Success was, perhaps, inevitable.


Cycling on Sarphatistraat PHOTOGRAPH: WESLEY VERHOEVE


Indie cred Te following morning, I leave my hotel near Oosterpark for the Indische Buurt neighbourhood, a yardstick for grassroots cool in Oost, named after the former Dutch East Indies colony. I’ve come to meet local guide Lex van Buuren, who suggests starting our tour at Studio/K, an arthouse cinema near his flat that shows films in Arabic, Turkish and Hindi. It’s become a nerve centre for arty livestreams — and Bowie tributes, too. “But it’s not just a theatre,” Lex


Te ‘immigration’


people talk about now comes mostly from


Amsterdam’s wealthier west. Lit by iron gas


lamps, streets resemble a Dutch master’s painting, sweetened by the aroma of Indonesian cafes


tells me. Clearly not. At 11am, crowds are already amassing at the on-site restaurant. Displayed in the window is tonight’s programme: a jazz show, a human rights lecture and a belly dancing workshop. We see lots of such multitasking venues as we wander around Sumatrastraat and Borneostraat, where breakfast joints are heaving all through the night, reflective of a community that’s up and about at all hours. Centuries ago, when Amsterdam’s


decrepit docklands were rebuilt nearby, Belgian and German dockworkers made up the majority


of Indische Buurt’s residents. But, Lex tells me, the neighbourhood’s name was inspired by the ships controlled by the Dutch East India Company that sailed to Indonesia. After Indonesian independence in the 1940s, Southeast Asian immigrants began to arrive in Indische Buurt. Surinamese followed, after their independence from the Dutch in 1975. Migration from Africa and the Middle East has added to the mix. Today, the ‘immigration’ people


talk about is mostly from residents of Amsterdam’s wealthier west to Indische Buurt’s tidy terraces. Lit by glossy iron gas lamps, streets seem as if they’ve been plucked right out of a Dutch master’s painting, sweetened by the aroma of curry from Indonesian cafes. I see women with headscarves, or no scarves, push buggies past a cottage marked ‘atelier’, where an artist crafts jewellery from discarded plastic. Kids play football at a school painted with colourful stripes. “Tey don’t talk about it at all,” he


says. “Tere’s enough social housing for everyone, and it’s very good.” He gestures to the tall, grand homes on Balistraat, renovated en masse a few years back and indistinguishable from the privately owned homes further on. “When they talk about gentrification, they’re talking about Javastraat,” says Lex.


First published in the Jan/Feb 2023 issue of National Geographic Traveller (UK). Read the feature in full at nationalgeographictraveller.co.uk/travel


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