Taste of Amsterdam

Taste of Amsterdam is an annual gastronomic festival held in the capital of the Netherlands. It is part of the internationally culinary phenomenon called Taste Festivals. Founded in 2009, it features the most skilled chefs from all over the country and abroad as well as Amsterdam’s finest restaurants offering their signature dishes in taste-sized portions.

Taste Festivals is a company that runs a series of food festivals in over 20 different cities around the world, from Toronto to Auckland and from Helsinki to Sao Paulo. It launched in 2004 with Taste of London. What started as a relatively modest food festival has since grown to become a global phenomenon that attracts foodies from all over the world, providing a unique culinary experience to thousands of people who are passionate about good food.

Taste of Amsterdam is a four-day culinary festival held in the Amstelpark, a large park in the center of Amsterdam known for its beautiful gardens. The program of the festival is packed with exciting events including food, wine and beer tastings, live shows and culinary demonstrations by renowned chefs at the Taste Theater, cooking competitions and workshops, a food market featuring over 100 vendors, special events for kids, and more.

Like other Taste Festivals, Taste of Amsterdam is first and foremost a restaurant festival. Some of the best restaurants that Amsterdam has to offer set up pop-up kitchens on site to provide attendees with a unique culinary experience, offering a selection of their most famous dishes in taste-sized portions. Small sizes of the dishes give a chance to taste as many dishes as you want at a reasonable price.

Alongside food tastings, the program of Taste of Amsterdam features a lot of entertaining events and activities. For example, the 2016 festival featured a baking lab, a workshop focusing on different types of wine glasses, a secret garden with wines and cheeses, Mystery Box Cooking Challenge, coffee tasting, Taste of Kids (a series of cooking workshops for children of all ages), whisky tastings, and more.

At Taste of Amsterdam, attendees can buy a day ticket for one of the four days of the festival or a passe-partout ticket that is valid all four days. They are also required to purchase festival tokens (florijnen) that are used as currency. At Taste Festivals, you can’t use cash or card to pay for food, you should use tokens instead.