Flow, Amsterdam: Worth the Wait, and It Was a Long One

We went to Flow on the morning after King’s Day.

King’s Day falls on 27 April and is the Dutch national holiday for the King’s birthday. The country spends it outdoors and in orange, on the water and in the streets, from early in the morning until well into the night. We had spent ours at the Heineken Experience.

What all of that meant for the following morning is the whole story of this post, including the part where the food took a little over an hour. I am going to tell it in order, because the order is the point.

Flow at a Glance
☕ What it is · An all-day brunch and specialty-coffee café in Oude Pijp, single-origin Ethiopian beans, natural wine, family with Locals twenty doors away.
🕗 Hours · Open 8am daily; closes 3pm weekdays, 4pm weekends. Breakfast and lunch only, not an all-day-into-dinner place.
🍽️ What to order · Spicy pulled chicken on smashed avocado, the loaded smashed avocado with turkey bacon added, and the whipped yoghurt. All three were excellent.
⏱️ The catch · We waited a little over an hour for food the morning after King’s Day, understaffed, and nothing came off the bill.
💡 Tip · Don’t go the morning after a national holiday, order coffee immediately, and don’t schedule anything straight afterwards.

The street

Flow sits at number 47 on Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat, in Oude Pijp, on a quiet residential stretch with wisteria coming over a wall further down and bicycles chained along the kerb. There are tables out on the pavement behind two long planters, and on a bright morning they fill first.

Twenty doors along the same street, at number 27, is Locals, where we had breakfast on another day. That turns out not to be a coincidence. Flow describes itself on its own Instagram as family with Locals, and both carry the same telephone number.

Inside

The room is long and narrow and runs back from the street. A sage green banquette takes one whole side with small wooden tables along it, the walls are finished in pale plaster, and slim vertical lights are set at intervals down the length.

Above the counter there is a line of neon bent into a wave, which reads as decoration until the same wave turns up in the logo on the awning outside and on the takeaway cups. The whole place is done in a very restrained palette and then given one deliberate flourish.

The counter runs along the other side, in pale stone, with the espresso machine and grinder at the end and a low glass case in front of it. On the shelves behind, small black bags of coffee stand in a row with price cards tucked underneath them, for sale to take home.

Behind the machine the same black bags continue along the upper shelves, with rows of stemmed glasses on the shelf below and two bottles standing at the end. Flow does not stop being useful when the coffee stops.

The coffee came. The food did not.

We ordered and the cappuccinos arrived in about twenty minutes, which was already slower than it looked like it should be, and they were very good. Proper latte art, the right temperature, none of that scalded taste places produce when they are rushing.

Then we waited.

We were on the bar stools beside the kitchen, which turned out to be the most informative seat in the building

Dirty plates were already stacked up when we sat down, so the backlog had started well before we got there and nobody was free to clear it. Behind that, there were not enough cooks working. That was the whole explanation for the delay and it was visible from a stool: not a slow kitchen, an understaffed one.

Out front it was the same story. The room was full and the floor was not, and one man was doing several jobs at once with the composure of somebody who had decided that panicking would not produce more staff. He was not slow and he was not flustered. There simply were not enough people.

The whole country had been out the previous day and a good part of the previous night. Whatever the reason for the staffing that morning, the timing was not hard to guess, and if anything it raised my opinion of the ones who did turn up.

In the end I asked the waiter where the food had got to, because by that point I was watching the clock. We had a Van Gogh Museum tour to get to that afternoon. What came back was a short apology and nothing else.

More people arrived to work about an hour in. So did our food, a little over an hour after we ordered.

Then it arrived, and we ate it very fast

Three plates, and all three were worth it.

The spicy pulled chicken comes on smashed avocado on sourdough, with a cucumber salad piled on top. The chicken is dark and heavily spiced, the avocado underneath cuts it, and the cucumber goes on last so it stays sharp and cold against the warm meat.

The smashed avocado is the one to order for the version with everything on it. Feta, sunflower and pumpkin seeds, thin slices of radish, cherry tomatoes, all on sourdough. We added turkey bacon, which arrives laid across the top in long dark strips, properly crisp at the edges.

And the whipped yoghurt, which is the quiet one and possibly the best composed. It comes in a steel bowl with the yoghurt, the chia seeds and the granola laid in three separate bands rather than stirred together, blueberries on the yoghurt side, so every spoonful is whatever the spoon happens to pick up.

We ate all of it very fast, which after an hour of waiting is either a compliment or a confession. It was a compliment.

What we did not order

There is a glass case on the counter with four loaf cakes in it, cut so the section shows, thickly iced on top.

I photographed them because they looked good and did not write down which was which, so I am not going to guess. One of them was green.

The bill

Nothing came off it.

That is the only part of the morning I would call a failure, and I keep returning to it. When a kitchen keeps a table waiting more than an hour for breakfast, the coffees should be on the house. It is not a grand gesture. It costs the business almost nothing, and it turns an hour of irritation into a story the customer tells warmly afterwards. We would have forgiven the entire morning for two cappuccinos.

The date explains why so few people were working. It does not explain charging the full amount to a table that waited an hour, and it does not explain leaving the apology until it had to be asked for. A busy day is a reason. It is not an excuse, and the difference between the two is decided by what a place does next.

Bubbly Tips

• Do not go the morning after King’s Day unless the day is free. Half the country is recovering and hospitality staffing across Amsterdam shows it.
• Order coffee immediately, before you look at the food menu. It arrives long before the kitchen does and it is worth having in front of you while you wait.
• Check the closing time before making it a late plan. Flow shuts at three on weekdays and four at weekends. It is a breakfast and lunch place, not an all-day one.
• The terrace fills before the room does. On a bright morning the outside tables go first, so arrive early if sitting on the street matters.
• Add the turkey bacon to the smashed avocado. It is offered across most of the food menu and it is the difference between a good plate and a very good one.
• Order the whipped yoghurt if somebody at the table wants something lighter. It is not an afterthought dish, and the granola is made in house.
• If Flow has a queue, walk twenty doors down. Locals is at number 27 on the same street, and the two are related.
• Take a bag of beans home. The coffee is single-origin Ethiopian and the same beans they pull in the room are on the shelf behind the counter.
• Do not schedule anything straight afterwards, and bring something to read. We had a tour that afternoon and spent the last stretch of the meal watching the clock instead of the plates.
• The bar stools beside the kitchen are the interesting seat. You can see the pass and watch the cooking, though it is also the noisiest spot in a narrow room.

Final Thoughts

An hour is a long time to wait for breakfast, and I am not going to dress that up. If somebody had a train to catch, that morning would have been a bad morning.

But the food was good enough that all three plates were empty within minutes of arriving, the coffee was good enough that the wait was survivable, and the person running most of the floor on his own was doing it with more grace than the situation deserved. The kitchen deserves to be judged on a normal day, and this was not one.

The service is a separate question, because how a place responds to a bad day is a choice rather than an accident. Two free coffees would have cost them very little and bought them this entire post in a warmer key.

I would go back. I would just not go the morning after a national holiday.

Until next time!

xoxo,
Bubbly 🎈