Café Bern

Cheese fondue for one at a brown café bar, unchanged since 1978, phone-only bookings.

Helmut Winzeler was a Swiss nuclear physicist who worked at CERN before he opened this dark little café on the Nieuwmarkt on 26 August 1978, and the kitchen has run on his recipes with near scientific rigour ever since. The menu is a handwritten card that barely changes: cheese fondue at 24 euro a head, an entrecôte Café Bern with salad at 25, emincé de veau, steak au poivre, spaghetti with meat sauce, and a soup of the day that is the only thing that moves. The room is exactly what you want from a brown café, wood, low light, a proper bar with stools, art on the walls that changes every couple of months. What makes it an eetcafé rather than a curiosity is that the fondue is genuinely good, the bread is right and the Swiss wines by the glass are chosen with care. Het Parool has put Bern in its list of the best fondue addresses in the city repeatedly, most recently in January 2026, and its 2017 Proefwerk review called it a good café with a good kitchen rather than a cult act. The caveat is logistics: reservations only by phone from 15:00, maximum twelve people, and the room fills fast on cold nights. Solo diners can order a single fondue, which is rarer than it should be.

Open daily 16:00 to 01:00, kitchen 18:00 to 23:00. Phone from 15:00 for a table or take a bar stool early. Order the fondue and the Jemenitische sla, and take a Fendant du Valais by the glass.