There are one million interesting things about Amsterdam and one million interesting things to say about each of those things. So any subject, like the division between East and West, can get involved. Since the city hemispheres out and around a brain like core, the way in which the furthest circumference East and that in the West are similar and different to one another and how each reflects or deviates from the center they both surround is a thing too, though one of many for another time.
While two brain-splitting streets divide the citi’s inner cerebellum, left and right include enough water filled streets and butter built houses to ensure you won’t notice the difference between one side and the other until your 17th visit, unless you notice right away.
(One of the interesting things about the city is how some things never lodge in your consciousness and others won’t leave it, like the color of the walls in the bedroom where you slept when you at eight years old or the way your father held a carving knife on a holiday.)
This past Sunday, in Cafe Thijssen I was thinking of this because it was the first time in years I’ve entered a cafe where no one wore masks and no vaccination code was asked for. For the first time since the pandemic I just walked into a spot to work and sit, doing so in a place I think of as the West’s Cafe Stevens.
Although shaped slightly differently, in terms of square footage, furnishings, and menu, you could probably swap all that is in one with all that is the other without anyone who does not go there every day noticing.
Both sit on corners that attract more than the usual number of tourists though both host regulars from the neighborhood. That every day in either you will see people the owner knows intimately and those ordering their first drink or meal in town offers lots of information about service and hospitality.
For the record, the soup at Thijssen does better than at Stevens but the Zalm Broodje at Stevens benefits from better bread, excellent wasabi mayo.
The biggest difference, I realized Sunday, is that Stevens maintains a far shorter list of employees. Over fifteen years, only a handful of people, all of whom I can picture served me. At Thijssen, the roster is always changing, or so it seems. This gives the latter a degree—like one degree out of a thousand—more a college bar feel. Though that may just be how it felt at 8:00 in the morning when the kid serving (probably 21, looked 12) with a deep baritone voice totally incongrous with his youthful looks greeted a buddy, the latter looking hungover while ordering one coffee after another.
Really, the biggest difference is that Thijssen opens at 8:00 and so far earlier than most places in town while Stevens waits until to 9:00.
As a rule, I prefer places where the staff sticks and came to love Stevens in part because I would see the same people there even when I visited only once a year.
Actually, of the brown cafes where you can spend all day, Thijssen might employ the least sticky staff town, though the owner has been the same for decades. On Sunday I romanticized this into the thought that he is trying to make sure to offer gigs to whoever wants them.
What I liked best was the thought that on the other side of town someone was thinking something similar, or not at all.