Freddie Janssen’s much-loved Dalston cafe and restaurant Snackbar is, fundamentally, a love letter to her home country, the Netherlands. Particularly its largest city, Amsterdam, where so-called “snackbars” are rife, and cherished for their high quality fast food.
“A snack bar is kind of like a Dutch version of a fish and chip shop. Like a hole in the wall kind of place,” Janssen tells me. “So a snack is that idea of fast food, but it’s very high quality, amazing, beautiful ingredients, and not cooked fast, because everything is homemade. Everything’s made from scratch. In the Netherlands, the snack bars, where you just get fries and everything is basically deep fried – deep fried sausages, deep fried cheese – all the food is in the vending machine. So you put in a coin and you take it out like that. It’s got a dark kitchen behind it essentially.”
