Kantjil en de Tijger

Visited this place on a friday evening.  It was quite busy and we have to wait for a table.  But I was disappointed after having dinner here.  The food was not warm enough and the taste was not as I expected.  I think they make it in bulk and warm it up in magnatron before serving. 

Have been to Kantjil en de Tijger twice now. The flavour of food is good, although it is not served hot, but more luke-warm. The first time I had the vegetarian nasi. It was nice, but it did rely heavily on eggs and tofu and not so much vegetables, and I did have about three times the amount of rice that my meat eating companions had (they also had Nasi Rames). The second time, we ordered the simplest ‘Rijsttafel’ for two and added two more vegetable dishes as we were with three people. This time the food was phenomenal – flavour wise – although not really warm (again). They need to train their staff, they have the rudest servers I have come across in a long time. Both times their servers refused to answer simple questions about the menu, and talked in a berating tone because we did not know what certain dishes were. We also (both times) only received half of the available menu’s and only after asking (because I knew there were more menu items) did we received the other two menus (drinks & specials). Be sure to order enough drinks when you sit down, because they will not bring you any more drinks during dinner. After clearing the table it is inpossible to get another drink or even receive the check.

Kantjil en de Tijger is a beautiful restaurant, specialising in Indonesian cuisine. It’s got a pleasant atmosphere that reminds you of long-forgotten colonial times. The menu is extensive and boasts mostly classics, such as the famous “rijsttafel.” As a native Cloggy, I am familiar with Indonesian food, so I did not order a “rijsttafel,” but several dishes from the à-la-carte menu instead: pangsit goreng (deep-fried stuffed noodles), roedjak manis (sweet salat), daging roedjak (spicy beef stew), nasi poetih (steamed rice) and off course krupuk (prawn crisps) and a Bintang beer to wash it down. Although not authentic and adjusted to the Dutch taste, I must say that the food here is still very tasty and infinitely better than the stuff sold at Chinese take-away restaurants in the Netherlands as “authentic Indonesian food.” Kantjil en de Tijger is somewhat more expensive, but given its location in the city centre of Amsterdam and the quality of the food offered, one cannot expect otherwise.
I can therefore recommend Kantjil en de Tijger. Due to its popularity it is often very busy and a reservation is advised!

REALLY GOOD BUT PRICEY! indonesian food is expensive so this one is not more expensive than any of the other ones. but compared to Surinamese restaurants where you get the same food but for half the price, this is expensive. I loved the coconut juice with the rose sirup. it tasted as amazing as it looked. they do some cheap-ish lunch time deals and there is the take away shop next door.

Kantjil has been a regular stop for many years for me. The food and service are always very good and it is always consistent. The food is priced well. I always intend to try other Indonesian restaurants, but Kantjil is becoming a habit.

When I told my Dutch friend that I was going to Amsterdam, she demanded that I go to Kantjil en de Tijger and have a huge plate of Indonesian food. If only so she could live vicariously through me as - when she lived in the city - it was one of her favourite restaurants. And, after a meal there, it wasn't difficult to see why.

Kantjil en de Tijger specialises in Indonesian cuisine, albeit Indonesian cuisine catered towards Dutch colonial tastes. Located in the heart of the city, this place gets very busy very quickly - when we went, we had to wait for fifteen minutes to get a table, and even then the service was remarkably slow (although a lot of this was probably due to our waiter spending ten minutes flirting with the two girls on the table across from ours). Thankfully, the food was excellent - our starter of Pangsit Goreng (deep fried stuffed dumplings) was wonderfully flavoursome, crunchy and moreish - filled with little gems of delicately spiced meat. My main of Lontong Rames was amazing - a plate pilled high with satay, shrimp, chicken, lamb and various vegetable dishes, all topped with the tastiest boiled egg I've ever eaten and wonderfully gelatinous rice cakes.

But the best part of the meal was undeniably the dessert, Spekkoek, a layed cake dessert which tasted of cinnamon and cardamon, surrounded by mascarpone cheese and topped with chocolate. One day I will learn to make this cake, even if I kidnap one of the chefs here in order to obtain the recipe.

This might not be 'authentic' Indonesian food, but it certainly was delicious. It's definitely easy to see why this place comes highly recommended - although they might want to work on speeding up their service a bit!

As a child, I used to go on family outings to a country manor outside Doordrecht, where the Indo-Dutch couple served rijsstaffel to travellers on an enormous common table in their old dining room. Papa never ordered fewer than 20 dishes, and those dishes were guaranteed to ping and pop every one of your thirty-some olefactory sensors. Some were hot enough to blow your skull off. So this is my standard for Indonesian cuisine, and by this standard, Kanjil is just OK.

Not that the food was bad, but after a while the peanut and coconut sauces grew monotonous. The green beans were just green beans, and the pickling of the cucumbers barely registered in the back of your mouth. Nothing kicked with the normal shipwrecking violence of great Indonesian cooking.

Dutchgrub, a Qyper of great taste and incisiveness, warns in his Amsterdam blog against the touristy Indonesian food to be found in Amsterdam. He has a point. We will keep looking for great rijsstaffel, because it has to be out there somewhere. But not here.

I had a great time in here when I visited. Food was well priced, interesting and did quite well compared to some of the fayre served up in Amsterdam. If you don’t want kebabs and chips or average food then here is a good place to come that will sit within the confines of a budget quite comfortably.

I like Kantjil en de Tijger - it’s a great place to bring people who don’t know what Indonesian food can be, or who don’t like spiced food so they can get an “adjusted” version of this most fantastic cuisine.

The servers don’t speak Indonesian, the food is mainly Dutch favourites from the idealised colonial days - but at least they don’t deep-fry the satay!

The decor is a nice clean retro-colonial, with enough space between tables and the toilets are good too.

It’s very suitable for groups at short notice, the servers are attractive and friendly, but the service can be a bit slow - ask for kroepoek, prawn crackers, if any of your party become hypoglycemic during the wait! - and I have to report that I had to send one dish back to the kitchen about a year ago for additional cooking (raw chicken might be a delicacy to some, not me!)

For one reason or another, I’m here a few times a year, it’s an easy option for people who want to move outside their comfort zone slowly and carefully.

It had been a while since I had Indonesian food and so on a recent trip to Amsterdam I swore that I would not step foot back on the plane without having proper peanut sauce, sates, and bami. So I made it a point to visit this Indonesian restaurant after reading previous reviews and turned out to be excellent. It was my last meal before heading back to Schiphol airport so I ducked in with a friend and had a rijst-tafel, which is basically a meal with rice as the base, accompanied by a whole lotta lovely mains and sides so it lets you sample quite a lot of items versus just ordering a main dish.

The rijst-tafel also seemed like an obvious choice in the somewhat complicated menu, where everything else was a la carte (order the rice/noodle, the veg, the menu, or whatever else you wanted to add to the noodle separately). Only after the meal did I spy another menu that had not been at our table that offered something of an ‘early-bird’ special between 4:30-7pm for a full meal of noodle/rice plus meat for 10 euro. Still, I am still happy with the full 11-dish Batavia rijst-tafel as we really went to town with the 4 satays in peanut sauce, ¼ chicken in soya sauce, gado gado (cold veggies in warm peanut sauce), beef pangang etc etc.

My summary: Delicious and plentiful Indonesian food in a central location. Nice atmosphere with dark wooden furniture complemented by a few large plants and statues. I can see why Kantjil has had sticking power in Amsterdam for 20 years already, and it’s close enough to Centraal Station and on a major tram line so it can’t be any more convenient.

I first discovered the Kantjil 3 years ago on a ‘boys weekend’ in Amsterdam. I’d asked the girl on reception in our hotel for a recommendation. 7 of us had a great meal and couldn’t stop talking about it when we arrived home. On the 2nd of May 2008, 3 of us lads plus another guy who didn’t come first time around, went to Amsterdam with our wives. The intention was always to go back to the Kantjil and even though we had also looked at other reviews for other places we did get back there on the sunday night. This time, like the last, we chose to have the Rijstaffel and we were not disappointed. each dish was brought to the table with a description of it. Lemon rice, mackerel, prawns, beef, pork, chicken, a selection of various vegatables. That is just a small ‘taster’ of what was put before us.
Don’t you just love it, when the food makes your mouth tingle and everyone of us thought we had a meal to remember.
The service was brilliant and the place itself is extremely clean, well apart form our table. With the dishes being passed backwards and forwards we were bound to spill some
I washed my food down with a couple of glasses of Palm beer, which is a Belgian beer, but other beers and a selection of wines were available. The price, we thought seemed a little bit expensive, certainly compared to 3 years ago, but on this particular weekend everything seemed expensive. Sunday was rememberance day and monday liberation day, so the entire city was packed, so I suppose the prices were increased to ‘make hay’. So how do you get to the Kantjil? The number 2 or 5 tram from central station run past the rear of the place with the stop being quite close. Ask for Spui, pronounced shpow. You also have a great choice of bars around the area for before or after your meal.
I will, when I get round to it post some photos of the trip, so keep an eye on my Qype.