Gitane

Gitane is an all-day cafe restaurant on Jan Pieter Heijestraat in Amsterdam Oud-West, open every day from 10:00 to 01:00, serving a short menu of Mediterranean-leaning seasonal plates alongside a natural wine list. It is the first restaurant from chef-owner Angelo Kremmydas, it appears in the MICHELIN Guide selection for Amsterdam, and it averages 4.4 stars across more than 1,000 Google reviews.

Expect small sharing plates rather than a tasting menu, a room designed by Studio Modijefsky across three levels, and a bar that keeps going after the kitchen stops. It is a strong choice for a group dinner, a solo seat at the bar, or a late glass of orange wine. It is not fine dining, and diners who arrive expecting a starred experience are the ones who leave unimpressed.

Gitane at a glance

The chef and the concept

Gitane is the debut restaurant of Angelo Kremmydas, a chef whose name circulated among Amsterdam’s food crowd for several years before he took a room of his own on Jan Pieter Heijestraat. The brief he set himself is narrow and easy to describe: refined cooking built on fresh, seasonal produce, drawn from a mix of cultures and flavours, served without ceremony. His Greek and Mediterranean references show up as accents rather than as a fixed regional identity, which is why takoyaki and lamb tostadas can sit on the same short list without the menu feeling scattered.

The operating model matters as much as the cooking. There is no tasting menu and no set courses. You order what you feel like from a small a la carte selection that changes with the season, and the kitchen runs the same room from morning coffee through to late-night wine. Very few Amsterdam restaurants attempt that range without one of the three services feeling like an afterthought.

What to order at Gitane

Dishes rotate with the season, so treat the following as recurring reference points rather than a fixed menu. The strongest work sits in two places: the vegetable and raw-fish plates, and the large-format meat.

• Cote de boeuf, the dish most consistently singled out by diners as the reason to bring a group rather than a pair.
• Lamb rump, which is the specific pick in Conde Nast Traveller’s Amsterdam roundup, and lamb tostadas, which reviewers have re-ordered mid-meal.
• Fish crudo and trout, both praised repeatedly for seasoning and freshness. One reviewer rated the herring plate the best they had eaten.
• Courgette and feta fritters, plus mushroom doughnuts, which are the two vegetable plates that come up most often in diner feedback.
• Takoyaki, the clearest expression of the cross-cultural side of the menu and a popular order at the bar.
• Sparkling pet-nat and orange wine. Natural wine is the backbone of the list, and the cocktails draw repeat praise too.

Two items to approach with managed expectations. Several diners have found the steak tartare under-seasoned despite good meat, and the lunchtime burger reads as filler on a menu that is otherwise ambitious.

Vegetarians and vegans are properly catered for rather than accommodated with substitutions. Menu trackers have logged roughly three vegan and five vegetarian dishes on the card at a given time, which is unusually generous for a restaurant whose signature dish is a shared rib of beef.

The room and where to sit

Studio Modijefsky divided the space into three distinct areas, and that division is what allows the all-day format to work. Choose your seat according to what you came for.

Ground-floor dining room

You arrive through a wooden vestibule with coloured glass into a double-height room lit by dark orange neon lettering above the bar. Vintage cafe chairs, reclaimed plank flooring and long benches with integrated terrazzo tops set a neighbourhood-bistro tone. One wall is an abstract patchwork of rough stucco and white tile running from the entrance past the bar to the kitchen; the opposite side holds two-tops under tall arched windows. This is the section to book for a group of four or more.

The sunken bar

Two steps down sits the best seat in the house for eating alone or drinking without a reservation. The counter is a sculptural zigzag in a custom grey and pink terrazzo that picks up the tones of the brick facade outside, set under an aged mirrored ceiling in dark brown. A glass-fronted fridge at one end displays the natural wine selection, and the far end opens a view into the kitchen. Once the kitchen closes, this area shifts fully into wine and cocktail bar mode.

Mezzanine and terrace

The original wooden staircase leads to a mezzanine under a rattan ceiling of geometric slats, where banquettes are broken into smaller pockets and open shelves hold vases and plates sourced from French bazaars. Request the table along the railing, which overlooks the whole ground floor. Outside, the terrace runs the length of the facade with red wooden love seats under striped orange and red awnings, plus a half-round bench around the corner for an aperitivo.

Where Gitane falls short

Three criticisms recur often enough in published diner feedback to be worth planning around.

• Portion sizes are small. Under-ordering is the most common route to a disappointing meal here, and the bill climbs faster than the number of plates suggests.
• Service is warm but can turn chaotic once the room is full. Reviewers who praise the food have flagged inattentive pacing in the same breath, and the state of the toilets on busy nights has drawn complaints more than once.
• Seasoning sometimes overshoots. Spice balance is the most frequent specific complaint about individual dishes.

There is also an expectations problem created by the MICHELIN listing. Diners on the r/finedining forum put it plainly: Gitane is not fine dining, though it is very good at what it actually is. Book it as a well-designed bistro with a serious wine list, and it delivers.

Booking, prices and getting there

Gitane sits on Jan Pieter Heijestraat in Oud-West, a short walk from the Overtoom and the western entrance to the Vondelpark, which makes it an easy pairing with an afternoon in the park or a film at a nearby cinema. Tram routes along the Overtoom and Jan Pieter Heijestraat put it within a few minutes of Amsterdam Centraal by public transport. Street parking in the district is paid and scarce, so arriving by tram, bike or on foot is the practical choice.

• Reserve ahead for dinner, especially Thursday to Saturday. Walk-ins are realistic at the bar and on the terrace outside peak hours.
• Current dish prices are not published on the rest