Eethuis Ricardo's

Old-school Creole home cooking from Ricardo himself, now settled on Javastraat.

Ricardo Uden cooked around Amsterdam for years before opening his own eethuis in 2007, and the move to Javastraat gave the Indische Buurt one of the last places in the city doing genuinely old-fashioned Creole Surinamese food. The marinated barbecue chicken is what people cross town for, lacquered, smoky, ridiculously cheap, but the deeper cuts are the reason to linger: heri heri with bakkeljauw (salt cod over cassava, plantain and egg), aardappelsteak, maize pap, and homestyle cookies like bojo that most Surinamese grandmothers stopped making commercially decades ago. It's a counter-service eethuis, not a restaurant with ambitions: fluorescent-bright, plastic-tabled, portions built for people who worked all day. Culinessa calls it her favourite Surinamese spot in Amsterdam, and the Waterkant diaspora press agrees. Bring cash-level price expectations and an appetite.

The heri heri with bakkeljauw, Friday's the traditional day for it.