Breakfast at Locals in De Pijp, and What Dutch Pancakes Actually Are

There is a right way and a wrong way to arrive at a brewery tour. The wrong way is on an empty stomach at eleven in the morning, having walked several kilometres already, with a tasting session waiting at the end of it.

So the Heineken Experience could wait half an hour. Breakfast came first.

The morning was 27 April, King’s Day, which meant the centre of Amsterdam was a street party and De Pijp was busy in the cheerful, orange, faintly chaotic way the whole city is on that date.

What I had not expected was to find a street that solves breakfast entirely.

Locals, De Pijp at a Glance
☕ What it is · An all-day brunch and specialty-coffee café on a corner of Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat in De Pijp, popular with locals.
🥞 Order this · The house-granola Greek yoghurt bowl and the triple stacked pancakes (vegan as standard; bacon and turkey bacon are add-ons).
📍 Where · De Pijp, a residential district a few minutes south of the Rijksmuseum and a short walk from the Heineken Experience.
🇳🇱 The catch · Those stacks are American. Real Dutch pancakes are pannenkoeken and poffertjes, eaten elsewhere.
💡 Tip · Card only, no laptops, opens at 8am. Eat here before a timed Heineken ticket.

The Breakfast Street

Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat runs through De Pijp, a few minutes south of the Rijksmuseum, and it is lined with brick terraces, bicycles chained to anything vertical, and a genuinely unreasonable number of places serving brunch.

The useful thing about it is that these are not places built for tourists. De Pijp is a residential district, the tables were full of people who plainly lived nearby, and nobody was holding a laminated card with pictures of the food on it.

Locals Jacob

Locals sits on a corner, with awnings on both frontages and pavement tables spilling out under the trees. It calls itself an all-day brunch and specialty coffee place, which is accurate and slightly undersells it.

The street is named after Jacob van Campen, the Dutch Golden Age architect who designed Amsterdam’s town hall on Dam Square. Construction began in 1648, and the building has served as the Royal Palace since the early nineteenth century. Having spent the previous week walking past it, I was pleased to find breakfast on his street

There is a second joke in the address that took me a while to notice. Locals’ other sit-down branch is on Daniël Stalpertstraat, named after the city master builder who was put in charge of actually constructing van Campen’s town hall. The company has, without apparently meaning to, opened on streets named after both the man who designed the Royal Palace and the man who built it.

The Coffee

I ordered a cappuccino, and it arrived with a rosetta drawn into the surface, which is the sort of thing that either matters or does not. It matters to me. A café that bothers with the pour is usually a café that bothers with the beans.

The coffee was good. Not clever, not sour, not trying to prove anything. Just properly made, hot, and the right strength to sit under a plate of something sweet.

What We Ordered

The Greek yoghurt bowl came first: yoghurt, house granola, sliced banana, berries and a heavy scatter of chia seeds. It is the sensible order, and I mention that because I did not stop there.

The granola is the part worth paying attention to. It is made in house, and it arrives as proper clusters with whole almonds and pumpkin seeds through it rather than the fine sandy stuff that sinks to the bottom of the bowl within a minute. Half the dish stayed crunchy to the last spoonful, which is not a given.

Then the triple stacked pancakes, with banana, blueberries, maple syrup, and turkey bacon added on top. The walking justified it. That is the position I am taking, and I am not revisiting it.

Ordering bacon onto a stack of pancakes is a decision that divides people along fairly predictable lines. The salt against the maple syrup is the whole argument for it, and it is a better argument than the sceptics allow. It does move the dish, though. What starts out as a sweet plate ends up somewhere between breakfast and dessert, and the pancakes stop being the only thing on it.

They were very good. Thick, soft, properly cooked through, and not the dense discs that turn up when a kitchen makes pancakes because the menu requires it rather than because anyone cares.

A Note on Dutch Pancakes

Here is the thing I got wrong, and it is worth setting out because a lot of visitors arrive with the same idea.

Pancakes are on practically every brunch menu in Amsterdam, and the Netherlands takes them seriously enough to have run a national pancake day since 2007. From that, it is easy to conclude that a tall American stack is a Dutch speciality.

It is not. The Dutch tradition is pannenkoeken: pan-sized, roughly 32 centimetres across, thin, closer to a crêpe than to anything stacked. They are eaten as a meal rather than as breakfast, frequently at dinner, and served with stroop, which is a thick molasses syrup, or with apple and cinnamon. Savoury versions carry bacon and cheese. They belong in a pannenkoekenhuis, a dedicated pancake house, of which Amsterdam has many.

The other Dutch pancake is the poffertje: small, puffed, made with a batter that traditionally blends buckwheat and wheat flour and is raised with yeast rather than baking powder, cooked in a pan of shallow round moulds. They are sold from carts as a snack or a pudding, under butter and icing sugar, and the first known recipe for them appears in a cookbook from the middle of the eighteenth century.

So the stack I ate was excellent, and it was American. Both things can be true. What the Dutch actually take pride in is a different object entirely, eaten at a different time of day, in a different sort of establishment.

Inside, on a Full Morning

The terraces were full by the time we finished, which on King’s Day is not a surprise. Inside there was plenty of room, and the inside is worth having: framed drawings covering one wall, stone-topped tables, and a frontage that folds right open onto the street so the two halves run together.

From a table by the window the terrace reads as an extension of the room, with heaters slung under the awning and the street going past a metre beyond the last chair.

That open frontage is the best thing about the building, and it is the reason the inside does not lose out to the terrace on a warm morning. Sitting indoors still puts a person in the middle of whatever the street is doing, which on 27 April was a steady procession of orange in both directions. The heaters under the awning were running, on a morning that still needed a coat.

Bubbly Tips

• Bring a card, not cash. The menu says PIN only, which in the Netherlands means paying by card. Cash is not an option here, and that is common enough across Dutch cafés to be worth planning around generally.
• Do not turn up to work. No laptops, and it is printed on the menu rather than hidden on a wall. This is a place for eating and talking, and it is busier for it.
• Walk in on a weekday, book at the weekend. We walked in on a public holiday morning and were seated without a wait. Weekend brunch is the pressure point, and reservations can be made through their site.
• Ask about inside if the terrace looks full. The pavement tables go first because everyone wants them. There was considerably more space indoors, and the frontage folds open anyway.
• Eight in the morning is the opening time. Useful if there is a timed ticket later in the day, which is exactly the position we were in.
• The pancakes are vegan unless you change them. They come plant-based as standard. Bacon, turkey bacon and extra fruit are all priced add-ons, so the plate can go in either direction.
• The Heineken Experience is a few minutes away on foot. Close enough that breakfast here and a tasting afterwards is an easy pairing, and eating first is strongly recommended.
• Keep walking if there is a queue. Several other brunch places sit within a few doors on the same street, so a wait at one is not a wait for breakfast.
• Treat any price you read online as historical. The menu moved between our visit and the time of writing. Check the current one before deciding what a meal will cost.
• For the actual Dutch tradition, go elsewhere. A brunch café serves American stacks. Pannenkoeken and poffertjes come from a pannenkoekenhuis or a street cart, and they are worth a separate trip rather than a substitution.

Final Thoughts

I went in wanting a pancake and came out having learned that the thing I ate was not the thing I thought I was eating. That is a small correction, and a useful one, and it did nothing to spoil the pancake.

What stays with me about that morning is not really the food. It is that Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat exists at all: an ordinary residential street ten minutes from the Rijksmuseum where the breakfast problem is solved four or five times over, at ordinary prices, for people who live there. Amsterdam is a city with a serious tourist-trap problem in its centre. De Pijp is the answer to it.

We made the Heineken Experience on a full stomach. Reader, this was the correct decision.

Until next time!

xoxo,
Bubbly 🎈