Chasing The Kerstman 2024: Christmas In Utrecht
[previously: Amsterdam]
It's a long story as to why we're in Utrecht, but it's not like that's stopped me in the past. The last time we spent Christmas in the Netherlands was in 2013. That trip was partly a rehearsal for a subsequent tour of Italy in 2015: in both cases, our transport between England and Europe was the Stena Line ferry between Harwich and the Hook. That worked out just fine both times, but the interesting bit was the train journey back to the Hook at the end of each holiday, which required us to change trains in Utrecht.
On that first occasion, I suspect it was The BBG who insisted we should leave Utrecht station to have a proper meal break, rather than a railway broodje. So we wandered around the city and ended up at Firma Pickles Burgers & Wines, where both the burgers and wines were excellent. To the extent that eighteen months later, on the way home from our two week tour of Italy, we got off the train at Utrecht and did it all over again.
It seems a bit much to have a favourite restaurant in a city where all you’ve ever done is change trains. Happily, when we paid a third visit to Firma Pickles at Christmas 2024, this time we stayed a bit longer.
For those of you following the series arc, we’re travelling to Utrecht directly from Amsterdam, and here’s one hell of a thing. Most major cities these days have credit card payments for public transport pretty much sewn up – no need to buy tickets, just tap your credit card at either end and your journey’s paid for. Just imagine if you could do that for an entire country! Well, the Netherlands is now that country, which is ironic given that only a dozen years ago inter-city train travel involved lots of queueing for ticket machines that mostly didn’t take plastic. This time, it’s as easy as getting a tube in London.
Once we’re in Utrecht, it’s even easier, because we’re spending Christmas entirely inside the boundaries of the old town, so everything’s walkable. The journey from the station to our hotel takes about 15 minutes, a good half of which is spent trying to leave the station, which is an even bigger shopping centre than Amsterdam Centraal. Our base for the next three days is the Court Hotel, which is a former courthouse rather than the former refugee camp we’ve just come from. It’s a little more traditional than we usually go, but the facilities are all good, and it leans into its past with lots of photos of smoking barristers on the walls. (I mean enjoying a cheeky cig rather than being sexually desirable, though I'm prepared to accept it's all down to personal taste.)
With our bags dropped off, we head out to see what’s to be seen. The obvious landmark is the Dom Tower, visible from most places including the street our hotel’s on. In the evenings during the festive season it’s home to Kleur de Stad, a sequence of brightly coloured projections occupying one whole side of the building (see photo). We watch this for a bit, and then do the first important business of the evening: dinner at Firma Pickles, which is as excellent as ever. What makes the place stand out is that they’ve got themselves a terrific wine list, and then made burgers good enough to hold their own against it.
We think this will be a good way to prepare for our second important business: going back to Dom Tower, and climbing up to the top of it. In retrospect, we could have prepared better, possibly with a year’s worth of mountaineering training or something like that. This slot – 8.30pm on Christmas Eve Eve – is the only one available during our three day stay with an English language guide, and does have the advantage of a beautifully clear nighttime view over Utrecht at the end of it. But to get to that you have to climb 400 steps – admittedly with helpful rest stops every hundred or so, but by the end of it The BBG and I feel we’ve reached our physical limit. The descent isn’t so bad, and at least you get a hot chocolate when you're back at ground level.
Then it’s Christmas Eve. (Here’s my favourite Christmas Eve song.) We start out by wandering around to see what’s open, and the answer is not much: though we do have a lovely breakfast at a bakery called Keek, and take note of the various interesting establishments along and near Springweg, including a higher proportion of comic shops than you would normally expect.
We have an ultimate destination in mind, and it’s the Museum Speelklok, a deconsecrated church that’s now home to a huge collection of music boxes, barrel organs and other machines that generated music in the days before sound recording. Surprisingly, a few tourists seem confused by all the Do Not Touch signs on pretty much every exhibit, presumably because they’ve missed all the information at the door about the free guided tours of the museum. Pick your language – English and Dutch are your options, of course – and an enthusiastic member of staff will take you round a couple of dozen machines and operate them for you. If you get the guy who showed us around, you may even catch him dancing. You’ll see utterly astonishing things – my favourite is an automatic violin player consisting of four separate fiddles, each one with robotic fingering on a single string – and after the tour you can still wander round and enjoy the displays in silent mode.
It's a couple of hours before our December 24th dinner, which is the centre of the celebrations in this part of the world. What to do? Inevitably, we go to a bar: and as this is the only city on our Dutch tour that doesn't have a BrewDog bar attached, we find a glorious alternative. Belgian Beer Cafe Olivier is located in our second deconsecrated church of the day, and is even more flippant than Museum Speelklok about its former life, with one wall occupied by a Dutch poem starting with the line ‘when fools drink water, St Peter laughs in heaven.’ The beer list is ridiculously impressive, and not limited to Belgian or, indeed, Dutch brews: our personal highlight is Tynt Meadow, made by the Leicestershire Trappists from Mount Saint Bernard Abbey. It seems appropriate in the still-ecclesiastical surroundings of Cafe Olivier.
In retrospect, banging through a couple of pre-dinner beers may have been a mistake, particularly when that dinner comes with an optional wine pairing. Nevertheless, dinner at Pand 33 ends up being just as spectacular as we hoped, a six course small plate epic that ends up taking about four hours. I get a series of generally veggie courses with a plate of wild boar as the centrepiece: we can’t quite remember what The BBG gets as the non-meat option. This is because the wine pairing consists of a full glass, not a taster, of a different wine with each course: and they leave the open bottle on the table in each case, suggesting we could have topups if we wanted. It has to be said that all this high class food and booze is served in a satisfyingly unpretentious manner - the tagline "fancy food, but elbows on the table are very much allowed" gets it pretty much spot on. It's a similar story with the very nice people on the adjacent tables, one of whom compliments me on my accent. (That hasn’t happened to me since my first ever visit to America, when on my first day a woman accused me of being Australian.)
As is traditionally the case in Europe, Christmas Day is less of a sacred holiday and more the day when you cope with the Christmas Eve hangover. So after a buffet breakfast at De Rechtbank (the restaurant attached to the Court Hotel), the first part of our day is spent blearily wandering the streets. To be fair, that's more than most of the locals seem to be doing, and central Utrecht appears to be largely overrun by cats today. As our two main meals of the day have been booked at De Rechtbank (because we had no real idea what else apart from the hotel would be open), we look for something light for Christmas lunch, and end up having some fine toasted sandwiches at Toastable, a chain with the undeniably true but nevertheless disturbing slogan 'everything is toastable'.
Of course, back home the idea of settling for a toastie at lunchtime on Christmas Day would seem scandalously un-festive, and maybe it's guilt on our part that takes us in the more sacred direction of Museum Catharijneconvent for the afternoon. It's best known as a museum of religious art and artefacts, but at this time of year it's home to what is boldly claimed to be "the most beautiful nativity scene in the Netherlands". Today there's a queue of about 40 minutes to get to see it, with plenty of context supplied by a display in the courtyard before you make it inside the museum. Inspired by the nativity scenes of Naples, this one uses actual 18th century figures depicting the key players plus about six hundred angelic, farmyard and human onlookers: and just like those Neopolitan scenes, it sets them in a just-recognisable version of the city where it's been installed, with local bar Winkel van Sinkel doubling as the inn and so on. I'm not so sure about 'beautiful', but the sheer gargantuan scale of the thing leaves you grinning from ear to ear.
We also get to visit the museum itself, and even get a discount at the door because we've left ourselves under an hour for our visit. Alongside the permanent exhibits, there's an excellent temporary display called In de ban van de middeleeuwen, which at least has the benefit of English captions (unlike much of the rest of the place). At its heart, it's a collection of religious art from the Middle Ages, but the fun bit is learning the stories of how these pieces made it here in the first place - it's all down to three collectors who basically were obsessed with the period and blagged art from numerous churches, without any real feeling for the subject matter. The highlight is a beautiful altarpiece with literal saw marks along one side, where the collector in question had hacked off a chunk so it would fit better over his bed.
Dinner is back at De Rechtbank, and it's nice enough but service is a bit slow, to the extent that we skip our paid-for dessert because we've got somewhere to be afterwards. You'd have thought that by now, we'd have got over the excitement of being able to go to a cinema on Christmas Day: particularly after 2021, when staying at a central London hotel gave us the opportunity to see a film in Leicester Square, only for it to be The Matrix Resurrections. But we've found a nice cinema in walking distance, as well as an interesting film. Springhaver actually advertises itself as a 'theatre cafe', but that doesn't prepare us for what a lovely bar they've got, the perfect cosy space for a cheeky drink on Christmas night (with some terrific local beers too). And then when the time comes, you go through a door at the back of the bar and you're at the cinema. You know by now that I spent all of 2024 secretly reviewing every film I saw that year, so I'll point you in the direction of Letterboxd to read what I thought at the time about The New Year That Never Came. Two months on, I'm still agog at the panache of its final sequence, and I'd love to see it again if someone could bring it over to the UK. Plus, we didn't realise until after the screening how appropriate it was to see it on Christmas Day. Happy 35th executionniversary, Nicolae!
And then it's Boxing Day, and time to move on. We've got more BrewDog bars to tick off the list...
Comments