Rijsttafel in Amsterdam

Tempo Doeloe Rijsttafel

The Dutch East India Company allowed Holland to rule the world for most of the 17th Century (which I learned PLENTY about on our recent trip to Amsterdam!)  Fortunately for the Dutch, this connection to Indonesia brought some of the spiciest, most flavorful and definitely the most fun dishes to northern Europe!  I am often a sucker for a salsa bar or tapas because of the volume of flavor options.  Rijsttafel is like a tasting menu on crack.  At Tempo Doeloe, a tiny yet packed restaurant off the Keisersgracht, the Rijsttafel begins with 6 tiny dishes of delicacies such as samovar, shrimp crisps, cucumber in vinegar and a chicken skewer in dark peanut sauce.  I believe these starters are meant as foils for the spicy plates to come.  Soon, platters arrived with 18 tiny dishes over warmers to keep our pace as we began with mild and worked our way up to extra spicy.  There were chicken dishes in curries and peanut sauces, beef in exponentially spicier gravies and vegetables ranging from simple cabbage to curried eggplants and peppers.  The final dish was served with a warning that we may want to tread lightly given the intensity of flavor in it.  I was reminded of the extreme pepper flavors at Spice Temple, another Southeast Asian restaurant in Sydney, where I discovered layers of antiseptic, citrus and smoke.  That final dish had each elegant layer of flavor, and then pretty much hit me over the head with such ferocity that my stomach turned!  This was way beyond a wasabi overdose.  Fortunately, I had tools to combat the attack: coconut mixed with sweet gravy, cabbage and saffron rice did the trick.