Baking Lab Amsterdam — Restaurant in Amsterdam

Quite disappointing. I went in for a cooking class recently for bread-making.

In overall, it was quite a disappointing experience or my expectation was completely different at the first place.

The owner of the place focuses a lot on ecology, the science of cooking, with fermentation, how different cooking methods contribute to the outcome of the cooking. This is great but he spent 80% talking about that until everyone is tired and exhausted. 10% of the time we are making the bread. Another 10% he’s busy cueing one of the participants, who happen to be studying engineering in the US about all different kinds of questions of physics or chemistry. It was fun to watch for the first two interaction, but it gets a bit old for me when it’s about the 10th time. Poor girl, she looks quite annoyed when I saw her outside at the end of the class, but that’s just my opinion.

I don’t want to discount their effort but the class was quite disorganized, I get life is about being spontaneous. But I actually want somewhat of an effort put in into structuring the class when we each paid a decent amount of money for that 3 hours. We have 10 people but the equipment and space are definitely not set up for that.

Nice space and friendly people - 4 stars Class content and...

This place is absolutely awesome, as I walked in my eyes took a second to process everything going on. It’s a huge and absolutely lovely space to be in, with some upstairs seating, a big baking area and what looked like an outdoor seating area through the kitchen.

There were plenty of options to pick from, croissants, pain au chocolates etc but I thought I’d go for the recommended raspberry and pistachio cake. The centre of the cake was crumbly and fruity, and that little dusting of crushed pistachios adding that little “joie de vivre”. The crust was firm and a bit crunchy meaning it didn’t fall to bits after the first bite. Complemented with a strong artisanal coffee (that really woke me up) this made for a great start to the day.

Thanks for the recommendation on the cake, and for lovely and efficient service in a busy...

Great food! I keep coming back despite service ranging from average to very poor - depends on who is serving you ( several times got treated as if I was interrupting the personnel (!) by placing an order, makes you feel so unwelcome. Incorrect processing of the order, zero interest in you as a customer ( verbal as well as body language) or in the act of serving itself which i consider to be the most essential quality if you are to work in a catering/ customer facing establishment. This is kind of rampant in Amsterdam anyway so the bar is low as such. But it's sad to see Baking Lab get this ingredient wrong while all the others are at right up there! I really hope they pay more...