Sea Palace

Yesterday I met with an expat group for a wonderful Chinese dim sum lunch. We went to the Sea Palace, which according to its website, is the first floating restaurant in Europe. Anyone who has been on one of the typical canal tours of Amsterdam has seen the Sea Palace, which is a huge pagoda-style building on the water not far from Central Station. I was a bit wary of going there, I just had this idea that it was not very good quality, but I was fortunately wrong.

The restaurant is not in the nicest of surroundings, next to the budget Botel, which has also always creeped me out, and now bordered on the land side by a lot of construction. I suppose if you were seated on the water side facing the center of town, you could forget about the area it's in. We were seated facing the pit of construction, but I wasn't paying attention to the outside much. The interior is oozing Chinese decorations from every corner, but it manages to keep a classy-enough atmosphere. The staff are all Chinese and a lot of Chinese people come to the restaurant, so it's rather authentic (especially with things on the menu like crispy baked pig's intestine, fried frog legs, and cow's stomach with leek and ginger).

I was lucky to be sitting at the table with the organizer of the lunch, who is Chinese-English. He not only knew all about the food on the menu and took care of the ordering, he also could speak whatever version of Chinese to the waiters, so that was handy.

We started off with a couple of very yummy noodle dishes before heading into more dim sum type stuff, like dumplings, steamed things, and fried wontons. We had stuff I would have never normally ordered myself, so that was good, to broaden my horizons. I liked some things more than others, but everything was very tasty. And cheap to boot. We had a table of nine and the bill was only just over 100 euros. Everyone thought it had to be a mistake, heh.

I am now dying to go back, but O isn't as keen on dim sum as the normal Chinese dishes, and it's better to go with a group so you can order a lot and not have too much food. At least I'm no longer afraid of the big floating pagoda, and it'd be fun to take visitors there.